The Macro Lens

Welcome to The Macro Lens

The Macro Lens logo with a magnifying glass highlighting a diverse group of people in front of a city skyline, symbolizing macro social work advocacy and community change.

Social workers are more than case managers and clinicians. We are advocates, organizers, policy shapers, and community leaders who drive justice at the systems level.

But macro practice resources are scattered. Policy toolkits live on government sites. Coalition frameworks hide in university repositories. Strategic planning guides sit behind paywalls. Finding what you need takes hours.

We’re changing that.

The Macro Lens curates practical tools, frameworks, and guidance for social workers and changemakers ready to move from direct service to systems change.

Start Here: Your Complete Resource Hub

[Explore 55+ Free Macro Practice Resources →]

Our flagship resource hub gives you immediate access to everything you need:

✅ Strategy & planning frameworks for community engagement
✅ Policy advocacy tools including lobbying compliance guides
✅ Racial equity toolkits with structured decision-making processes
✅ Community assessment templates and demographic data sources
✅ Coalition building resources for grassroots organizing
✅ Evaluation frameworks and logic model builders
✅ Grant seeking guides and funder research tools
✅ Self-care strategies to sustain long-term practice
✅ Career pathways for macro social work

Every resource includes what it offers and how it helps. No fluff. No PhD required. Just tools that work.

Updated quarterly. 55 resources across 9 categories. 100% free.

New to Macro Practice?

These foundational articles explain why social workers are uniquely positioned for systems change:

Start Your Macro Social Work Journey Today

Get the free guide Intro to Macro Social Work: A Beginner’s Guide. Inside, you’ll find practical tools, clear explanations, and strategies to help you step confidently into macro practice.

Subscribe below and we’ll send the guide straight to your inbox. Plus, you’ll get new articles and resources from The Macro Lens to keep building your skills.







Blog

Illustration of a magnifying glass highlighting diverse people against a cityscape and gears, representing macro social work resources for systemic change.

  • Your MSW Macro Practicum Guide: Designing Your Own Systems-Change Field Experience

    Illustration of the MSW macro practicum guide: a student surrounded by icons representing policy, organizations, data, and community systems.

    The MSW Macro Practicum Guide

    Most MSW students accept whatever practicum placement their program offers. But what if you could design a field experience that actually teaches you how to create change at the systems level?

    This guide walks you through how to build a “creative laboratory” MSW macro practicum: a student-designed macro placement where you drive the learning, partner with organizations doing work you care about, and develop systems-level skills that most social work graduates never get the chance to practice.

    This approach is grounded in actual CSWE accreditation standards and proven through real student experience.

    Is This Guide Right for You?

    This guide is especially useful if you:

    • Are intentionally pursuing macro social work
    • Care about policy, organizing, advocacy, program development, or administration
    • Are willing to start planning 6 to 9 months in advance
    • Feel frustrated by the lack of meaningful MSW macro practicum options
    • Are open to initiating conversations with organizations and supervisors

    This approach may not be the best fit if you:

    • Want a fully pre-arranged placement with minimal setup
    • Are pursuing exclusively clinical training
    • Prefer programs to manage most logistics for you
    • Need a practicum that fits neatly into existing clinical pipelines

    Feeling unsure or intimidated at this point is completely normal. Most students are never taught that designing a placement is even possible.

    Why the Standard Practicum Process Fails Macro Students

    If you are interested in policy, organizing, advocacy, or administration, you have probably noticed something. Your program has dozens of clinical placements lined up, but macro options are scarce. When you ask about macro field sites, you may hear:

    • “We don’t have many of those”
    • “That would be difficult to arrange”
    • “Have you considered getting your clinical license first?”

    This is not your imagination. Research shows that fewer than 10% of MSW students complete macro-focused practicums, and fewer than 7% even request them.

    The shortage is not because macro placements are impossible. It exists because field education structures were built around clinical practice assumptions. Programs designed their field systems around agencies with MSW clinical supervisors, established organizational hierarchies, and predictable business-hour schedules. Macro organizations, especially grassroots advocacy groups and community-led initiatives, often do not fit these templates.

    What most students are never told: CSWE standards allow far more flexibility than most programs use. Many barriers students encounter are local policy choices, not accreditation requirements.

    What CSWE Actually Allows

    The 2022 CSWE Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards do not require on-site MSW supervision in every case.

    When a field instructor does not hold a CSWE-accredited degree or does not meet experience requirements, the standards state that “the program assumes responsibility for reinforcing a social work perspective”.

    Translation: External MSW supervision is explicitly permitted when programs ensure social work perspective is maintained.

    This allows students to complete practicums in organizations led by community organizers, policy analysts, lived experience advocates, or grassroots coalitions, as long as an MSW with at least two years of post-degree experience provides field supervision separately.

    Programs have used external supervision models for decades, particularly for rural placements and macro field sites. Many field offices simply do not advertise this option or present it as a standard pathway.

    The Creative Laboratory Model at a Glance

    9-Month MSW Macro Practicum Guide Planning Timeline showing six phases: Foundation Phase (identify focus area and map organizations), Outreach Phase (contact organizations), Setup Phase (secure external MSW supervision), Approval Phase (navigate field office approval), Finalization Phase (finalize placement logistics), and Active Phase (conduct cross-jurisdictional research during placement)

    How it works:

    1. Student designs the placement
    2. Organization provides day-to-day task supervision
    3. External MSW provides field supervision
    4. Student conducts cross-jurisdictional research
    5. Findings are shared back with the organization

    Instead of being a passive recipient of available slots, you become an active architect of your learning.

    The Four Core Components

    1. Student-Driven Placement Design

    You identify organizations whose work aligns with your values and learning goals, then approach them directly. This inverts the typical model where you wait for programs to assign placements.

    2. External MSW Supervision

    An MSW supervisor provides field instruction (often about one hour per week via video call) while a task supervisor at the placement guides daily work. This structure opens up placements at organizations without MSW-credentialed staff.

    3. Cross-Jurisdictional Organizational Research

    You study how similar organizations in other states approach the same issues, learning from their successes and failures. This builds your capacity to see patterns across systems.

    4. Mission-Driven Knowledge Sharing

    You bring research findings back to your placement organization as a resource, contributing knowledge rather than only extracting it. This positions you as a partner, not just a student.

    Step-by-Step Implementation Guide

    Timeline: Start 6 to 9 Months Before Practicum

    This approach requires more lead time than standard matching, but that investment pays off in a placement that actually fits your goals.

    Step 1: Identify Your Focus Area

    When: 6 to 9 months before practicum

    Get specific. “I want to do macro practice” is too vague. Instead, ask yourself:

    • What population or community do I want to serve?
    • What systems-level approach resonates with me? (Policy analysis, community organizing, program development, advocacy, administration?)
    • What kind of change am I trying to create?

    Write this down clearly. Example: “I want to work on housing justice for people experiencing homelessness through tenant organizing and policy advocacy in my state.”

    Being specific helps you identify the right organizations and articulate your interests when you reach out.

    Step 2: Map the Organizational Landscape

    When: 5 to 6 months before

    Now that you know your focus, find out who’s doing this work well. Use strategic Google searches:

    • “[population] advocacy [your state]”
    • “[issue area] organizing [your region]”
    • “[policy area] coalition [your state]”

    Examples:

    • “tenant rights organizing Iowa”
    • “harm reduction advocacy Minnesota”
    • “environmental justice coalition Pennsylvania”

    Go beyond the first page of results. Look for:

    • Statewide advocacy coalitions
    • Grassroots organizing groups
    • Policy research organizations
    • Community-led initiatives
    • Lived experience-led programs

    Create a tracking spreadsheet:

    • Organization name
    • Mission and approach
    • Key programs or campaigns
    • Contact information
    • Notes on why their work resonates

    Step 3: Identify Your Learning Targets

    When: 5 to 6 months before

    From your research, identify 2 to 3 organizations where you most want to learn. Look for places where:

    • The work aligns with your values and interests
    • The approach teaches skills you want to develop
    • The leadership demonstrates the kind of practice you admire
    • The organization’s scale matches your learning goals

    Don’t just chase prestigious names. A small but effective grassroots organization often provides better learning opportunities than a large bureaucracy where you’ll get lost.

    Step 4: Reach Out Proactively

    When: 4 to 5 months before

    This step requires courage, but it’s essential. Email or call the organizations directly. Ask for a conversation, not a commitment.

    Email template:

    Subject: MSW Student Interested in Field Placement

    Dear [Name],

    I’m an MSW student at [University] who will be completing my practicum placement starting [semester/year]. I’ve been following [Organization’s] work on [specific issue], and your approach to [specific strategy or program] aligns closely with the kind of systems-change work I want to learn.

    I’m exploring whether there might be opportunities for a field placement with your organization. I would need approximately [10-20] hours per week for [number] months, beginning [start date].

    I understand you may not have an MSW on staff to provide field supervision. If that’s the case, I can arrange external MSW supervision separately, which CSWE accreditation standards explicitly permit. This would mean someone from your team would provide day-to-day task supervision and guidance, while an external MSW would handle the formal field instruction requirements.

    Would you be open to a brief conversation about whether this might be feasible? I’m happy to work around your schedule.

    Thank you for considering this.

    [Your name]
    [Contact information]

    Key points:

    • Be specific about what drew you to their work
    • Explain the time commitment clearly
    • Proactively address the supervision question
    • Ask for a conversation, not a commitment

    Step 5: Secure External MSW Supervision

    When: 3 to 5 months before

    If your chosen organization doesn’t have an MSW supervisor on staff, you’ll need to arrange external supervision. You need an MSW with at least two years of post-degree experience willing to provide approximately one hour per week of supervision (frequency depends on your program’s requirements).

    Where to find external supervisors:

    • State social work Facebook groups: Join groups like “Social Workers of [State]” and post that you’re seeking an external field supervisor for a macro placement
    • NASW chapters: Contact your state NASW chapter and ask if they know macro practitioners willing to supervise students
    • Macro social work networks: LinkedIn groups focused on macro practice often have members willing to mentor students
    • Your field director: Ask if they maintain a list of external supervisors
    • Faculty connections: Professors who teach macro practice courses often know practitioners in the field
    • Alumni networks: Your program’s alumni who work in macro roles might be willing to supervise

    What to say when asking:

    I’m an MSW student arranging a field placement with [Organization] working on [issue area]. They don’t have an MSW on staff, so I’m seeking an external field supervisor. This would involve approximately one hour per week of supervision, which could be done via video call, to help me connect my placement work to social work competencies and values. Would you be open to discussing this possibility?

    Be transparent about compensation. Some programs pay external supervisors a stipend or honorarium. Ask your field director about this. If your program doesn’t offer compensation, be upfront when asking. Many macro practitioners are willing to mentor students as professional contribution, but they deserve to know the arrangement.

    Step 6: Navigate Field Office Approval

    When: 3 to 4 months before

    Once you have a potential placement and a plan for supervision, you’ll need to get your field office to approve the arrangement.

    Documents to prepare:

    1. Placement proposal: One-page description of the organization, the work you’d do, and how it connects to EPAS competencies
    2. Supervision plan: Clear explanation of who provides task supervision and who provides field instruction
    3. Learning agreement draft: Preliminary outline of macro-focused learning activities

    Meeting with your field director:

    Request a meeting specifically to discuss your proposed placement. Come prepared:

    • Bring printed copies of your placement proposal and supervision plan
    • Reference CSWE’s flexibility on external supervision explicitly
    • Emphasize the learning value and alignment with macro competencies
    • Have backup options ready if they raise concerns

    If you encounter resistance:

    Some field directors may not be familiar with external supervision models or may have concerns about nontraditional placements.

    Common objections and responses:

    • “We don’t usually do this”: CSWE standards explicitly permit it, and programs like University of Denver have used this model successfully for years.
    • “How do we ensure quality?”: The external MSW supervisor ensures social work perspective, and I’ll meet all the same competency requirements as any other student.
    • “What about liability?”: The liability concerns are the same as any placement. CSWE has clarified that field education qualifies as educational experience, not employment.

    If your field director remains resistant, ask them to point to the specific CSWE requirement that prevents your proposed arrangement. Often, resistance comes from unfamiliarity rather than actual prohibition.

    Step 7: Finalize Placement Logistics

    When: 2 to 3 months before

    Once you have field office approval:

    Formalize agreements:

    • Sign any required agreements between your program, the placement organization, and external supervisor
    • Clarify scheduling expectations (days/hours per week)
    • Establish communication plans between task supervisor and external supervisor
    • Set up regular supervision meeting times

    Develop your learning agreement:

    • Work with your external supervisor to translate placement activities into EPAS competency language
    • Identify specific macro-focused projects you’ll complete
    • Set measurable learning objectives
    • Build in flexibility for emerging opportunities

    Step 8: Conduct Cross-Jurisdictional Organizational Research

    When: During placement

    This component transforms you from a student who only extracts learning to someone who contributes knowledge.

    Identify comparable organizations (Weeks 1-2):

    • Search for organizations doing similar work in other states
    • Look for different approaches to the same issues
    • Identify organizations at different scales (local, state, national)

    Conduct informational interviews (Weeks 3-8):

    Reach out to 5 to 8 comparable organizations and request brief (20 to 30 minute) phone or video conversations. Ask:

    • What strategies have been most effective for you?
    • What barriers have you encountered in this work?
    • How is your work funded?
    • What would you do differently if you were starting over?
    • What resources or training helped your team most?
    • How do you measure impact?

    Take detailed notes during these conversations.

    Synthesize findings (Weeks 9-12):

    Look for patterns across your interviews:

    • Which strategies appear most frequently?
    • What common barriers do organizations identify?
    • What innovative approaches did you discover?
    • What gaps or opportunities did you notice?

    Create a comparison framework organizing what you learned by theme (strategy, funding, barriers, impact measurement).

    Share back with your placement organization (Weeks 13-15):

    Prepare a presentation or written report for your placement organization:

    • Summarize key findings
    • Highlight strategies they might consider
    • Identify resources or approaches from other contexts
    • Offer recommendations based on patterns you observed

    This positions you as a knowledge broker who enhanced your organization’s capacity, not just someone who completed required hours.

    Step 9: Document and Share Your Learning

    When: Throughout and after

    Your creative laboratory practicum produces knowledge that other students could benefit from:

    During the placement:

    • Keep a reflective journal documenting challenges, innovations, and lessons learned
    • Track specific examples of how you applied macro competencies
    • Note what worked well and what you’d modify

    After the placement:

    • Write a case study of your experience
    • Share your story with other students interested in macro practice
    • Provide feedback to your field office about what supported your success
    • Consider publishing your experience in student journals or field education publications

    Real-World Example: Iowa Child Advocacy Board

    My own MSW macro practicum at the Iowa Child Advocacy Board (ICAB) demonstrates this model. My target population was children and families involved in the child welfare system, and I selected the state agency overseeing Iowa’s Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) program as my practicum placement.

    ICAB did not have an MSW on staff, so day-to-day task supervision was provided by ICAB’s executive director, while field supervision was arranged externally with an MSW.

    For my cross-jurisdictional research, I studied CASA programs in several states, including New Jersey, Colorado, and Texas. I interviewed program directors and staff and gathered comparative information on key program features, including:

    • Organizational structure (nonprofit vs state administered)
    • Funding sources
    • Referral pathways for children and families
    • Methods for collecting child and family outcome data
    • Notable barriers programs have encountered
    • Perceived strengths of each approach

    I brought this research back to ICAB as concrete resources and models they could adapt. Across programs, data collection emerged as the area with the greatest variation and the most significant opportunity for improvement. Based on those findings, I spent the second half of my placement developing a system to collect child and family outcome data. This work included:

    • Securing board approval to develop and pilot a new data collection model
    • Designing surveys, using tools shared by the New Jersey and Colorado programs as a foundation
    • Conducting focus groups with program coordinators and volunteers
    • Recruiting coordinators for pilot implementation
    • Overseeing the first round of surveys
    • Reporting findings directly to the board

    The placement became a genuine partnership where I contributed knowledge while developing macro practice skills. This work led to an offer to continue my work in the role of CASA Child Assessment Data Manager. The experience strengthened my skills in program development, community partnership, cross-sector collaboration, and designing innovative systems-level interventions, skills I continue to use in my work today.

    Common Challenges and Solutions

    Challenge: “My program won’t approve this”

    Solution: Request a meeting specifically to review CSWE standards together. Bring documentation showing that external supervision is explicitly permitted. Ask what specific concerns prevent approval and address each one directly. If necessary, escalate to the director of your MSW program.

    Challenge: “I can’t find an external supervisor”

    Solution: Expand your search beyond your immediate network. Post in multiple online social work groups. Contact NASW chapters in neighboring cities. Ask your university’s career services for alumni working in macro practice. Consider whether a recently retired macro practitioner might be interested. Supervision can be conducted via video call, so geography doesn’t have to limit you.

    Challenge: “The organization said no”

    Solution: Don’t take it personally. Organizations may have legitimate capacity constraints. Thank them for considering it and ask if they know other organizations that might be good fits. Move to your second choice organization. This is why you identified 2 to 3 targets.

    Challenge: “This feels overwhelming”

    Solution: Break it into smaller steps. Focus on just the next action. Ask for help from professors, advisors, or students who’ve done nontraditional placements. Remember that the extra effort upfront creates a dramatically better learning experience. The process itself builds macro skills.

    Challenge: “My placement organization has different expectations than I do”

    Solution: Clear communication prevents most issues. Establish explicit agreements about hours, projects, and deliverables before starting. Have your task supervisor and external supervisor communicate regularly. Address misalignments early rather than letting them grow.

    What You’ll Gain

    Students who design creative laboratory practicums develop capabilities that standard placements rarely offer:

    Strategic thinking: You learn to analyze organizational landscapes, identify opportunities, and design interventions rather than just implementing existing programs.

    Self-advocacy: The process of creating your placement teaches you to articulate your value, negotiate arrangements, and navigate institutional systems.

    Cross-jurisdictional learning: You build knowledge about how different contexts approach similar challenges, giving you broader perspective than single-site placements provide.

    Innovation capacity: By contributing research to your placement organization, you practice generating new approaches rather than just maintaining existing services.

    Professional networks: You build relationships with practitioners across multiple organizations and jurisdictions, creating connections that support your career.

    Confidence: You prove to yourself that you can create opportunities rather than waiting for them to be handed to you.

    These capabilities matter because macro practice requires exactly these skills: seeing patterns across systems, designing interventions, building partnerships, and creating change pathways where none existed before.

    Why This Matters for the Profession

    Every student who completes a creative laboratory practicum helps shift social work education toward justice and systems change. You demonstrate that macro placements work, that external supervision is viable, that grassroots organizations are legitimate field sites, and that students can drive their own learning.

    Your success makes it easier for the next student. When field offices see that student-designed placements produce strong learning outcomes, they become more willing to approve them. When grassroots organizations have positive experiences hosting students, they’re more likely to do it again. When external supervisors mentor successfully, they often continue supporting students.

    Clinical drift persists partly because structures make clinical pathways easy and macro pathways difficult. Students who navigate the difficult path successfully begin changing those structures.

    Getting Started

    If you do one thing after reading this, start mapping organizations this week. Everything else builds from that foundation.

    Your immediate next steps:

    1. This week: Identify your focus area and start mapping the organizational landscape
    2. Next week: Join state social work Facebook groups and start researching potential placement organizations
    3. Within two weeks: Reach out to at least one organization to begin conversations
    4. Within one month: Meet with your field director to discuss the possibility

    The earlier you start, the more options you’ll have and the stronger your placement will be.

    Resources and Further Reading

    CSWE Standards: Review the 2022 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards directly to understand what’s actually required versus what programs add.

    Field Education Literature: Wayne et al.’s (2006) “Off-Site MSW Field Instruction” in Field Educator provides historical context and examples of external supervision models.

    Macro Practice Networks:

    Macro Social Work Resources: Visit our curated list of more than 50 guides, frameworks, and tools social work students and practitioners can use to engage in systems work.

    Student Stories: Search “macro social work field placement” in academic databases to find published student narratives and case studies.

    Final Thoughts

    MSW practicums represent rare protected time for learning, exploration, and innovation that most graduates never have again in traditional employment. Programs often undersell this opportunity by treating field placement as an administrative matching process rather than a creative space for developing systems-change capacity.

    You don’t have to accept the limitations that programs impose. You can design a practicum that teaches you how to create change at the systems level, builds partnerships with organizations doing justice work, and contributes knowledge to the field.

    The process requires initiative, persistence, and courage. But those are exactly the qualities macro practice demands. Your field placement can teach you how to innovate in social services, or it can teach you to accept constraints as inevitable.

    The choice is partly yours.

    This guide is based on my working paper “The Practicum as Creative Laboratory: Reimagining MSW Field Education for Macro Social Work”, available on ResearchGate. For questions or to share your experience with creative laboratory practicums, email hello@themacrolens.com.

  • The Epistemic Regeneration Spiral: Rebuilding Trust and Reclaiming Our Systems-Change Mandate

    Epistemic regeneration spiral depicted as an upward spiral of light and growth symbolizing coordinated action, trust rebuilding, and macro systems change

    This article was adapted from a theoretical working paper published on SSRN. It is meant to translate the theory into practitioner friendly language. Those interested in the full academic text can access it here.

    Introduction: Turning the Spiral the Other Way

    The Epistemic Erosion Spiral explained why social work struggles to change the systems it claims to serve. Clinical drift narrows public perception. Narrowed perception accelerates distrust. Distrust filters out lived experience knowledge. Weakened macro practice reinforces further clinical dominance. Each turn tightens the spiral.

    That framework helped name something many practitioners already felt. The problem was not lack of effort. It was a self-reinforcing collapse of legitimacy.

    But spirals do not move in only one direction.

    If legitimacy erodes through reinforcing dynamics, it can also be rebuilt through them. The Epistemic Regeneration Spiral proposes a counter-mechanism. It explains how coordinated macro expansion can broaden public perception. Visible systems-level effectiveness rebuilds trust. Trust opens pathways for lived experience leadership. That leadership strengthens macro efficacy in ways that justify sustained institutional investment.

    This is not quick reform. Clinical drift developed over decades. Reversing it will take time. What this framework offers is a way for reform efforts to stop canceling each other out and begin compounding instead. The question is whether we can coordinate reform efforts to build momentum rather than fragment them across unconnected domains.

    The full theoretical framework is published as an SSRN working paper. What follows is a practitioner-facing translation focused on how the mechanism works and why isolated reforms keep stalling.

    From Erosion to Regeneration

    The Epistemic Regeneration Spiral is not a new reform agenda. It is the inverse logic of the Epistemic Erosion Spiral.

    Where erosion operates through fragmentation, regeneration requires integration.

    • Erosion narrows public perception. Regeneration expands it through visible macro outcomes.
    • Erosion accelerates distrust. Regeneration allows trust to emerge through demonstrated effectiveness.
    • Erosion filters out lived experience knowledge. Regeneration creates pathways for lived experience authority.
    • Erosion weakens macro practice. Regeneration strengthens it through epistemic diversification.
    • Erosion stabilizes clinical dominance. Regeneration stabilizes macro expansion through shared governance.

    The key shift is not which interventions we pursue, but whether they operate as isolated fixes or as mutually reinforcing mechanisms.

    Why Isolated Reforms Keep Failing

    Epistemic regeneration spiral table showing how curriculum reform, advocacy, trust building, and lived experience hiring fail without coordination
    Table 1. Why Existing Interventions Fail to Reverse Clinical Drift

    For decades, social work has tried to counter clinical drift.

    Accreditation standards mandate macro competencies. The CSWE Special Commission to Advance Macro Social Work Practice has reinforced these requirements. Schools add policy courses and macro concentrations. Professional associations affirm the importance of systems change. Trust-building frameworks improve relationships with communities. Lived experience hiring expands peer and advisory roles.

    These efforts matter. They are not failures.

    But they have not reversed clinical drift.

    The reason is fragmentation. Each reform addresses one stage of erosion while leaving the others intact. Gains in one domain are neutralized by unaddressed constraints elsewhere.

    Curriculum reform offers a clear example. Students learn policy analysis and community organizing, then graduate into a labor market with few macro roles, limited field placements, and professional messaging that still centers clinical work. Education expands, pathways do not. The result is symbolic commitment rather than durable change.

    Professional advocacy faces similar limits. Policy statements and conference sessions affirm macro practice, but without visible systems-level outcomes or widely recognized macro role models, public perception does not shift. Advocacy without visibility cannot counter decades of narrowed professional identity.

    Trust-building initiatives improve relational engagement, particularly in child welfare and community practice. Families experience more respectful interactions. Yet when decision-making authority remains unchanged, trust becomes consultation rather than power.

    Lived experience initiatives show some of the strongest empirical support in the field. Peer and lived experience roles improve engagement, accountability, and outcomes. But these roles overwhelmingly remain frontline or advisory. Without macro infrastructure and governance authority, lived experience leadership is added without being empowered.

    Each intervention generates local gains. Each stalls when other stages of erosion remain in place.

    The Epistemic Regeneration Spiral explains why. It shows how these reforms must interact to build momentum rather than cancel each other out.

    Stop spinning your wheels on reforms that don’t stick

    You’re already doing the work. You’re pushing for curriculum changes, advocating for policy shifts, building trust with communities. But isolated efforts keep stalling. Subscribe for frameworks and tools for coordinating reform across education, practice, and governance so your efforts actually compound instead of canceling each other out.

    The Five Stages of the Epistemic Regeneration Spiral

    Epistemic regeneration spiral diagram illustrating five reinforcing stages of macro expansion, trust building, lived experience leadership, and strengthened systems change

    The Epistemic Regeneration Spiral operates through five interdependent stages. These stages do not function as a checklist. They reinforce one another through feedback dynamics. Progress in one increases the likelihood and durability of progress in others.

    Stage One: Expanded Public Perception Through Visible Macro Practice

    Regeneration begins by broadening what social work is understood to be.

    Decades of clinical drift have narrowed public perception toward therapy, case management, and crisis response. Macro roles in policy, governance, and systems design remain largely invisible. This invisibility reshapes who sees social work as relevant or trustworthy, particularly among communities whose primary contact occurs through coercive systems.

    Public perception does not change through messaging alone. It changes when macro practice becomes visible, credible, and demonstrably effective. Policy reforms, institutional redesigns, community-level interventions, and sustained systems-change initiatives make macro work legible.

    Visibility matters even more when macro leadership includes people with lived experience. When system-impacted individuals occupy decision-making roles, they challenge assumptions about who holds legitimate authority and what social work can accomplish. Macro practice becomes real.

    Expanded perception alters expectations. When social work is seen primarily as surveillance, trust is unlikely. When it is seen as structural intervention and shared problem-solving, trust becomes possible.

    Stage Two: Trust Building Through Demonstrated Systems-Level Effectiveness

    Expanded perception enables trust, but trust sustains only through demonstrated efficacy.

    Trust develops when macro interventions produce outcomes aligned with community-defined priorities, when power is exercised transparently, and when follow-through is reliable. Both institutional trust in organizations and interpersonal trust in practitioners matter.

    Trust here is not a prerequisite for action. It is an outcome of visible effectiveness. When institutions demonstrate systems-level impact in ways communities recognize as meaningful, trust increases incrementally.

    This is where trust becomes generative rather than merely relational.

    As defensive engagement shifts toward conditional partnership, relational infrastructure forms that lowers barriers to participation in the next stage.

    Stage Three: Lived Experience Entry Into Macro Pathways

    Trust lowers barriers to participation.

    When institutions are perceived as credible partners rather than extractive actors, individuals with lived experience are more likely to pursue macro practice pathways instead of disengaging from the profession entirely.

    Research across child welfare, behavioral health, disability services, and criminal justice shows that lived experience leaders function as epistemic authorities. Their knowledge reshapes problem definition, intervention design, and accountability. This authority is not symbolic. It produces different outcomes.

    Visible macro pathways matter. When system-impacted individuals see people like themselves governing policy, designing programs, and setting priorities, macro practice becomes imaginable as a viable career rather than an elite domain reserved for credentialed professionals.

    Participation expands through recognition, not recruitment slogans.

    Stage Four: Strengthened Macro Practice Capacity and Outcomes

    As participation expands, macro capacity strengthens.

    Lived experience leadership diversifies epistemic perspectives, improves institutional responsiveness, and enhances the profession’s ability to address complex structural problems. Systems-level outcomes become more visible: policy changes, redesigned institutions, community-defined indicators of success.

    These visible outcomes do more than demonstrate effectiveness. They reshape professional identity. Research shows identity is shaped more by socialization and field experience than by curriculum alone. When macro practice becomes a visible site of learning, mentorship, and success, students and practitioners internalize it as core professional practice rather than a niche specialization.

    Macro efficacy reinforces trust and perception, creating momentum toward institutional change.

    Stage Five: Institutional Expansion Through Shared Governance

    But participation and efficacy alone remain vulnerable without structural protection.

    Institutional expansion without governance reform risks reproducing exclusion under new branding. Shared governance distributes decision-making authority across stakeholders rather than concentrating it within professional hierarchies.

    When lived experience leaders hold formal authority over curricula, accreditation priorities, research agendas, and organizational policy, epistemic justice becomes institutional function rather than aspirational value.

    Structural embedding protects reforms from erosion during leadership transitions and funding shifts. It converts episodic progress into durable transformation.

    How Regeneration Becomes Self-Reinforcing

    The Epistemic Regeneration Spiral is not linear. It operates through interacting feedback loops.

    Expanded perception supports trust. Trust enables participation. Participation strengthens macro efficacy. Efficacy justifies institutional expansion. Expansion further amplifies perception.

    These dynamics do not wait for one another to complete. They reinforce one another simultaneously, which is precisely why coordination matters more than any single intervention.

    Why This Moment Is Different

    The Epistemic Regeneration Spiral does not operate in a vacuum.

    Youth engagement in social justice movements has increased dramatically over the past decade. Data show that participation in protests among people ages 18–29 increased more than fivefold between 2016 and 2020, alongside a double-digit increase in youth voter turnout. This reflects sustained engagement, not fleeting activism. When macro practice is visible and institutionally supported, this justice orientation can translate into professional pipelines rather than burnout or exit.

    At the same time, epistemic justice movements have gained traction across systems. Credible messenger initiatives, parent partner models in child welfare, and peer leadership in behavioral health demonstrate that lived experience leadership improves outcomes, accountability, and trust. This creates both pressure and opportunity for professions that claim to serve marginalized communities.

    These conditions alone do not initiate regeneration, but they shape the terrain on which coordinated intervention can gain traction.

    Failure Modes to Watch For

    The Epistemic Regeneration Spiral can stall at predictable points. Understanding these failure modes helps practitioners recognize when coordination has broken down and intervention is fragmenting rather than compounding.

    Macro Expansion Without Governance Becomes Performative Inclusion

    What it looks like: Schools add macro concentrations and hire additional faculty. Organizations create community advisory boards and lived experience councils. Professional associations launch macro practice initiatives. On paper, macro capacity is expanding.

    Where it breaks: Decision-making authority remains unchanged. Advisory boards provide input that leadership can accept or ignore without consequence. Lived experience workers sit on committees but don’t vote on policy. Faculty teach macro content but have no authority over accreditation priorities or curriculum requirements.

    The outcome: Expansion becomes optics. Communities recognize the pattern quickly. The presence of macro infrastructure without governance authority reproduces the very exclusion it claims to address. Cynicism deepens. Trust erodes faster than if expansion had never occurred.

    How to recognize it in your context: Ask who holds veto power. If lived experience leaders can be outvoted, overruled, or excluded from final decisions, you’re seeing performative inclusion. If community input shapes conversation but not outcomes, governance hasn’t shifted.

    Trust Without Authority Becomes Consultation

    What it looks like: Child welfare agencies implement family engagement specialists. Organizations adopt trauma-informed approaches and relationship-based practice models. Workers spend more time building rapport. Families report feeling heard and respected.

    Where it breaks: When decisions must be made, the same hierarchies reassert themselves. Caseworkers consult families, then submit recommendations to supervisors who weren’t in the room. Trust-building occurs at the frontline while authority concentrates at administrative levels that families never access.

    The outcome: Relational gains don’t translate into power shifts. Families experience better interactions but the same outcomes. When crises emerge, the relationship infrastructure collapses because it was never backed by structural authority. Workers burn out trying to maintain trust in systems that betray it.

    How to recognize it in your context: Track decision-making moments. Do the people who built trust with families also hold authority to act on that trust? Can they commit resources, modify plans, or override standard protocols? If trust-building and decision-making are separated across different roles or levels, you’re seeing consultation without authority.

    Visibility Without Efficacy Becomes Marketing

    What it looks like: Organizations publicize macro initiatives. Social media campaigns highlight policy advocacy. Conference presentations showcase systems change work. Macro practice becomes more visible across professional platforms.

    Where it breaks: The visible work doesn’t produce measurable systems-level outcomes. Policy advocacy generates statements but not legislation. Community organizing produces events but not institutional change. Visibility increases while impact remains ambiguous or unmeasured.

    The outcome: Public perception shifts toward skepticism rather than expanded understanding. Macro practice becomes associated with performance rather than effectiveness. When outcomes don’t materialize, visibility backfires. It confirms rather than challenges the perception that macro work is theoretical, abstract, or politically motivated rather than results-oriented.

    How to recognize it in your context: Can you point to specific policy changes, institutional redesigns, or community-defined indicators that improved because of macro intervention? Are outcomes visible to the communities you serve, or only to professional audiences? If you’re announcing efforts more than results, visibility has detached from efficacy.

    Pathways Without Infrastructure Become Burnout

    What it looks like: Graduate programs recruit students with lived experience into macro concentrations. Organizations hire credible messengers and parent partners into systems change roles. Professional development programs encourage frontline workers to pursue policy and advocacy work.

    Where it breaks: Field placements remain scarce. Macro employment opportunities don’t expand proportionally to recruitment. Credential requirements function as barriers. Lived experience workers enter macro pathways only to find insufficient mentorship, unclear career ladders, and job descriptions that weren’t designed for their backgrounds.

    The outcome: Recruitment outpaces infrastructure development. Workers with lived experience carry extraordinary cognitive and emotional loads trying to navigate systems that weren’t built for them. Burnout occurs not because the work is inherently unsustainable, but because the infrastructure to support it doesn’t exist. Exit rates increase. The profession loses precisely the epistemic diversity it claims to value.

    How to recognize it in your context: Are lived experience workers concentrated in entry-level or advisory roles? Do they have clear advancement pathways? Are supervision structures adapted to their backgrounds, or are they supervised by people who don’t understand their knowledge base? If you’re recruiting lived experience leadership faster than you’re building infrastructure to support it, you’re creating conditions for burnout.

    Epistemic Diversification Without Institutional Protection Becomes Tokenization

    What it looks like: Organizations celebrate lived experience hiring. Workers with system involvement join teams and bring fresh perspectives. Their insights reshape problem definition and intervention design. Initial contributions are valued and integrated.

    Where it breaks: When budget constraints emerge, lived experience positions are the first cut because they’re not protected by accreditation requirements or licensing mandates. When leadership transitions occur, new administrators question the value of roles they didn’t create. When conflicts arise between lived experience knowledge and organizational norms, institutional pressure reasserts conformity.

    The outcome: Lived experience knowledge is extracted during its useful phase, then discarded when it becomes inconvenient or expensive. Workers experience their expertise as valued only when it aligns with institutional preferences. The diversity that strengthened macro practice becomes temporary rather than durable. Remaining workers recognize the pattern and either disengage or leave.

    How to recognize it in your context: Are lived experience positions grant-funded or general-budget? Are they the first roles eliminated during restructuring? Do job descriptions include minimum credential requirements that functionally exclude people with lived experience, even when exceptions exist on paper? If lived experience knowledge can be easily removed without institutional consequence, protection hasn’t been embedded.

    Reform Momentum Without Critical Mass Becomes Regression

    What it looks like: Progressive leadership implements shared governance structures. Reforms gain traction. Macro practice expands. Lived experience authority increases. The spiral appears to be working.

    Where it breaks: Leadership transitions. A new executive director, dean, or board prioritizes different values. Budget pressures create space for retrenchment. Reforms that hadn’t reached critical mass get reversed incrementally. Shared governance structures remain on paper but lose functional authority. Clinical dominance reasserts itself through hiring priorities, resource allocation, and informal norms.

    The outcome: Progress evaporates faster than it developed. The memory of reform creates cynicism rather than foundation for renewal. Workers who invested in change experience disillusionment. Communities that began rebuilding trust experience betrayal. The next reform effort faces heightened skepticism because people watched the last one collapse.

    How to recognize it in your context: Research on professional norm change suggests 40-50% critical mass is necessary for self-sustaining transformation. Below this threshold, reforms remain vulnerable to reversal. Are macro practitioners, lived experience leaders, and shared governance advocates concentrated in a few positions, or distributed across institutional structure? Can reforms survive leadership transition? If progress depends on specific individuals rather than embedded norms, critical mass hasn’t been reached.

    The Pattern Across Failure Modes

    These failure modes share common characteristics. They occur when:

    • One stage advances while others lag: Expansion without governance. Trust without authority. Visibility without efficacy.
    • Coordination breaks down: Reforms fragment across disconnected domains rather than reinforcing each other.
    • Symbolic change substitutes for structural change: Presence without power. Participation without authority.
    • Infrastructure lags behind recruitment: Pathways open before support systems exist.
    • Protection remains informal: Changes depend on specific leaders rather than institutional embedding.

    The Epistemic Regeneration Spiral requires integrity across all five stages simultaneously. Progress in one stage creates conditions for progress in others, but only when coordination is maintained. Isolation at any point breaks the feedback dynamic that makes regeneration self-reinforcing.

    Recognizing these failure modes early allows practitioners to intervene before momentum collapses entirely. The question is not whether your efforts will encounter these patterns. The question is whether you can identify them quickly enough to coordinate responses before fragmentation becomes entrenched.

    What This Means for Practitioners Right Now

    This framework suggests different leverage points depending on your role.

    If you are a macro educator, curriculum reform matters most when paired with visible field placement partnerships and employment pathways.

    If you are involved in hiring, credential requirements may be functioning as epistemic filters that weaken outcomes rather than protect quality.

    If you are in leadership, trust-building efforts will stall unless accompanied by redistribution of decision-making authority.

    If you are a practitioner with lived experience, the absence of macro pathways is not a personal failing. It is a structural one.

    Testing the Framework

    The Epistemic Regeneration Spiral is a theoretical model, not a proven mechanism. Individual components have strong empirical support, but integrated implementation research remains limited.

    What the framework offers is a testable hypothesis with clear predictions and measurable outcomes.

    Implementation will require coordinated commitment across education, professional bodies, organizations, and research. The stakes extend beyond social work. Many professions face similar legitimacy crises when credentialed expertise crowds out lived experience knowledge.

    The Epistemic Regeneration Spiral is not inevitable. But it is possible. Whether possibility becomes reality depends on whether reforms are coordinated rather than siloed.

    The full academic paper, including citations and theoretical development, is available on SSRN. Educators, researchers, and practitioners are invited to use and adapt the framework in their work.

    Access the Complete Research Series

    The Epistemic Erosion and Regeneration Spirals are part of an ongoing research agenda examining professional legitimacy, lived experience leadership, and macro practice renewal.

    Available on my ORCID profile:

    • Working papers with full citations
    • Theoretical frameworks for adaptation
    • Updates on implementation research
    • Citation tracking and metrics

    Educators, researchers, and practitioners are invited to use and adapt these frameworks in their work.

  • The Epistemic Erosion Spiral: Why Social Work Struggles to Change the Systems It Claims to Serve

    Eroded concrete structure exposing internal layers, representing the epistemic erosion spiral and structural breakdown in social systems.

    Introduction: The Epistemic Erosion Spiral

    Social work has always carried a dual mandate: providing direct support to individuals in crisis while taking structural action against the conditions that produce harm. For decades, the profession has understood that individual suffering often reflects policy choices, institutional power, and unequal social conditions. Direct service was never meant to replace systems reform. It was meant to inform it.

    More than thirty years ago, social work scholars Harry Specht and Mark Courtney warned that the profession faced institutional collapse as it drifted away from its roots in social justice and community advocacy toward an increasingly clinical identity, a pattern they described as clinical drift in Unfaithful Angels. Their warning has proven prophetic. Since then, clinical drift has become a widely recognized pattern shaping social work education, licensure, labor markets, and public perception, even as its structural consequences have intensified rather than diminished.

    The result is not merely an internal imbalance between micro and macro practice. It is a legitimacy crisis. When the public primarily encounters social workers through surveillance-adjacent institutions, and when macro work becomes less visible inside the profession itself, mistrust becomes rational rather than symbolic. This article offers a framework for understanding how clinical drift functions as a legitimacy problem that operates through public perception and the systematic exclusion of lived experience knowledge from positions of epistemic authority.

    I recently published an academic version of this analysis as a working paper that synthesizes interdisciplinary research on this pattern. What follows translates that framework for practitioners, educators, and macro workers who need to understand why social work continues to struggle with systemic reform despite widespread agreement that such reform is necessary. This is not an academic exercise. It is an attempt to build vocabulary and diagnostic tools that can inform how we interrupt a spiral that many recognize but have struggled to name. The argument is not anti-clinical. It is that professional drift has consequences, and those consequences concentrate in the very communities social work claims to serve.

    Throughout this article, lived experience refers specifically to coercive system involvement, including child welfare, criminal legal systems, and involuntary treatment, as well as membership in marginalized communities facing structural barriers. It does not refer simply to personal experience of mental health conditions.

    The Legitimacy Terrain: Historical Trauma and Cultural Distrust

    Social work does not enter vulnerable communities with a blank slate. The profession carries a historical legacy that shapes how communities interpret its contemporary identity.

    For decades, social workers played central roles in child welfare systems that inflicted profound trauma on marginalized families. White, middle-class social workers entered Black, Native American, poor, disabled, and culturally distinct communities with moral certainty and institutional authority. They separated families, removed children, and imposed dominant cultural norms under the guise of protection. These actions were not aberrations. They were structurally embedded functions of the profession as it existed in those eras.

    Contemporary research documents the persistence of these patterns. Child protective services investigations themselves constitute significant interventions that produce widespread surveillance of Black and Native American families and generate lasting harm even when no removal occurs. Approximately one in two Black and Native American children experience CPS investigation compared with roughly one in four White children, while relatively few investigations result in substantive services. In this context, surveillance becomes the experience rather than a side effect. Even unsubstantiated investigations seed distrust and drive system avoidance. Parents conceal information from social workers, educators, and healthcare providers not because they reject support, but because contact can carry risk.

    Alongside this history sits deep cultural skepticism toward mental health services. This stigma is not a cultural deficiency. It is a socially and historically produced response to marginalization, misdiagnosis, coercion, and exclusion from mental health systems. Research documents how religious and cultural frameworks in many communities interpret distress through spiritual, relational, or collective frameworks rather than individual pathology. When mental health professionals treat these frameworks as obstacles to treatment rather than legitimate epistemologies, they reinforce distrust rather than reduce it.

    For many marginalized communities, engagement with mental health services has historically led to diagnosis, medication, institutionalization, or family separation. Scholars examining service utilization among Indigenous populations note that historical trauma, systemic racism, and cultural disconnection create legitimate reasons for avoiding Western mental health services. When seeking help has historically led to harm, avoidance becomes a rational protective strategy rather than resistance to care.

    These two dynamics are distinct but compounding. Historical trauma from child welfare involvement primes distrust of social workers as agents of surveillance, while skepticism toward mental health systems primes distrust of clinical intervention. As social work’s public identity narrows toward clinical practice, these histories converge, collapsing social work’s image into domains already associated with harm. This legitimacy terrain shapes how all subsequent professional actions are interpreted.

    How the Epistemic Erosion Spiral Operates

    Diagram showing the epistemic erosion spiral as a cyclical process linking clinical drift, legitimacy loss, exclusion of lived experience knowledge, and weakened systems change capacity in social work.
    The epistemic erosion spiral operates as a self-reinforcing system of reciprocal causation.

    The epistemic erosion spiral describes a self-reinforcing system of reciprocal causation rather than a linear pipeline. Each stage reinforces the others, often operating simultaneously and intensifying over time. The spiral can be entered at any point, and interventions that address only one stage will be undermined by dynamics operating at the others.

    Here, epistemic refers to whose knowledge is treated as authoritative in defining social problems and determining legitimate solutions. This is not about representation or inclusion in the abstract. It is about which forms of knowledge are granted decision-making power in shaping systems.

    Stage One: Clinical Drift Narrows Public Perception

    Over recent decades, social work has increasingly organized itself around clinical infrastructure. Clinical licensure pathways dominate credentialing systems. Insurance reimbursement privileges therapy services. Employment pipelines funnel graduates toward clinical roles. Educational programs emphasize clinical preparation because that is where stable employment and income exist.

    Visibility compounds this drift. Students observe where jobs are concentrated and orient accordingly. The public encounters social workers primarily in therapeutic or child welfare settings and understands the profession through that lens. Media portrayals emphasize individual casework and crisis intervention, while policy advocacy and systems reform remain largely invisible.

    A 2023 national survey found that 71% of Americans view social workers favorably, yet public understanding of what social workers actually do concentrates heavily on therapy and child protective services. Social work’s macro identity exists primarily within academic and professional spaces, not in public consciousness. This narrowed perception positions the profession squarely within domains that many vulnerable communities have learned to distrust.

    Stage Two: Narrowed Perception Accelerates Distrust

    For families shaped by experiences of surveillance, removal, or coercive intervention, encountering social workers primarily as clinicians often does not build confidence. For many, it confirms long-standing suspicion. As social work becomes publicly legible primarily as therapy and surveillance-adjacent service delivery, it inherits the layered distrust already attached to those systems.

    This distrust is not abstract. It alters behavior. Families disengage from services, withhold information, delay help-seeking, and warn others to avoid contact. This produces a devastating paradox. Those most in need of support are often those most likely to avoid it because social work has become associated with monitoring and pathologization rather than structural advocacy.

    Practitioners see this dynamic daily in schools, hospitals, child welfare agencies, and community settings. It is not a failure of individual rapport. It is a structural consequence of professional identity. When a school social worker tries to connect a family to services, past CPS involvement may make that family wary of any professional offering help. When a hospital social worker assesses discharge needs, the clinical framing itself can trigger defensive responses rooted in historical experience.

    Stage Three: Distrust Filters Out Lived Experience Knowledge

    This is where the spiral cuts deepest.

    When social work loses legitimacy in communities most impacted by coercive systems, people from those communities stop seeing macro social work as a viable pathway for change. The profession begins filtering out precisely the knowledge it needs most for effective systems reform. Critically, this is not just about losing diverse voices. It is about systematically excluding the forms of knowledge most capable of identifying how policies produce unintended harms, how systems function from the perspective of those subjected to them, and which interventions might actually build rather than erode trust.

    This epistemic filtering operates through several reinforcing mechanisms. First, there is professional identity conflict. Why pursue a profession primarily associated with those who separated your family, criminalized your community, or subjected you to involuntary treatment? The cognitive dissonance is substantial. Macro educators see this when talented community organizers express interest in policy work but recoil when the pathway requires joining a profession they associate with surveillance.

    Second, there are educational barriers. MSW programs require substantial financial investment with limited funding for non-traditional students. Admission criteria privilege academic credentials over community leadership. The socialization process emphasizes professionalization, boundary maintenance, and expertise hierarchies. Students with lived experience of the systems they want to change often encounter messaging that their knowledge is subjective or less rigorous than academic theory. This epistemic invalidation communicates that experiential knowledge is something to overcome through professionalization rather than a form of expertise to be centered in how problems are defined and solutions designed.

    Third, labor market dynamics reinforce this exclusion. Macro roles are fewer, often less stable, and frequently pay less than clinical positions. Even when organizations claim to value lived experience, hiring practices privilege traditional credentials and years of professional experience over community-grounded expertise. Administrators justify these decisions by pointing to funder expectations or organizational credentialing standards, rarely examining how those standards themselves function as epistemic filters.

    The cumulative effect is predictable. Many system-impacted leaders pursue other pathways, including peer support, grassroots organizing, advocacy outside social work, or entirely different fields where their knowledge is treated as authoritative rather than supplemental. Social work loses access to the forms of knowledge essential for designing, legitimizing, and sustaining systems change.

    This loss is not merely a diversity failure. It is an epistemic one. Research documents distinct contributions that lived experience professionals bring to social services: survivor-centered perspectives that challenge deficit-based approaches, cultural competence grounded in community membership rather than academic study, innovative practice approaches developed through necessity rather than theory, and trust-building capacity that credentialed professionals often cannot achieve. Studies of peer support workers in criminal legal systems show they provide unique value in engagement, retention, and outcomes. Research on youth mental health interventions finds that peer support from people with lived experience produces meaningful benefits.

    When macro social work operates without robust participation from people who carry lived experience knowledge, it loses access to how systems actually function from the inside. It loses insight into unintended consequences of well-intentioned policies. It loses credibility with communities that have learned to distrust professional helpers. It loses the innovation that emerges from necessity rather than abstraction.

    Stage Four: Weakened Macro Practice Reinforces Clinical Dominance

    The final stage completes the spiral.

    As macro practice weakens due to diminished legitimacy and the exclusion of lived experience knowledge, its reduced effectiveness becomes evidence for further clinical investment. Policy advocacy appears slow and unproductive. Community organizing struggles to gain traction. Individual therapy, by contrast, produces immediate and measurable outcomes.

    This logic appears reasonable in resource-constrained environments, but it misidentifies the cause of macro underperformance. Structural change work is not inherently less effective. It is operating without the epistemic resources and community trust required to succeed.

    Research on macro social work education shows that students often find macro curriculum disconnected from practice realities. They report learning theoretical frameworks that do not translate to actual policy work, community organizing, or advocacy. Faculty acknowledge challenges in recruiting field placements that provide meaningful macro experience. Graduates struggle to find employment in macro roles that match their training. Faculty themselves often observe this pattern but frame it as a curricular or resource problem rather than recognizing it as symptomatic of the profession’s broader legitimacy crisis in the communities where systems change work must be grounded.

    These problems are not merely curricular or logistical. They are legitimacy problems. When communities do not trust social work as a vehicle for systems change, organizations do not hire social workers for policy roles. When advocates with lived experience pursue other professional pathways, the macro labor pool loses the knowledge authority needed for credible community partnership. When the public understands social work as primarily clinical, funding predictably flows toward therapy services rather than structural intervention.

    The spiral tightens. Clinical drift narrows public perception, which accelerates distrust on historically traumatized terrain, which filters out lived experience knowledge authority, which weakens macro practice effectiveness, which justifies further clinical investment. Each turn reinforces the next, and the cycle can sustain itself across decades.

    Why This Is a Legitimacy Problem, Not Just a Resource Problem

    The micro-macro imbalance is often framed as a resource allocation issue. Clinical practice generates revenue through insurance reimbursement. Macro practice depends on grant funding, government contracts, and nonprofit budgets. In a market-driven system, resources flow toward what pays.

    This description is accurate but incomplete. It treats the problem as economic when it is fundamentally about legitimacy and epistemic authority.

    Resource problems can be addressed through funding, staffing, and efficiency improvements. Legitimacy problems cannot. Trust cannot be purchased. Epistemic exclusion cannot be corrected with better grant writing. Relationships fractured by surveillance and coercion cannot be repaired by expanding headcount. Knowledge authority cannot be redistributed through hiring diversity targets that maintain traditional credentialing as the arbiter of expertise.

    When social work treats clinical drift as a resource problem, it pursues solutions that cannot resolve the underlying crisis. Advocacy for macro funding helps, but it does not rebuild trust with communities that have learned to avoid social workers. Curriculum expansion for macro content matters, but it does not create pathways for lived experience leadership or restructure who gets to define what counts as valid knowledge. Job creation in policy roles is valuable, but it does not address the filtering mechanisms that exclude the knowledge most needed for those roles.

    Interrupting the Spiral: Restoring Epistemic Authority to Lived Experience

    Breaking the epistemic erosion spiral requires interventions that directly address knowledge authority, not just resource distribution or symbolic inclusion. The following structural changes challenge existing professional boundaries and power distributions. They are unified by a single principle: restoring lived experience as a legitimate basis for epistemic authority in defining problems and designing solutions.

    Redesign educational pathways to recognize lived experience as authoritative knowledge. Social work education must create explicit tracks for people with lived experience of coercive systems who want to pursue macro practice. This means dedicated funding structures that provide living stipends, not just tuition coverage. Admission criteria must explicitly recognize community leadership and systems navigation as forms of expertise equivalent to academic credentials in authority and rigor. Curriculum must position lived experience knowledge as foundational to policy analysis, program evaluation, and community organizing, not as perspective to be supplemented by professional theory. Field education must prioritize placements in grassroots organizations and community-led initiatives where experiential knowledge already holds epistemic authority. Faculty with lived experience should be hired into tenure-track positions with full authority over curriculum design and knowledge production standards.

    Transform hiring practices to recognize multiple forms of epistemic authority. Every macro position that requires an MSW degree makes a choice about which forms of knowledge count as authoritative for defining and solving problems. Organizations must critically examine these credential requirements and ask whether the role actually requires formal social work education or whether it requires knowledge that can be demonstrated through community organizing experience, policy advocacy work, or systems navigation. Hiring processes must involve community members with lived experience not merely in advisory roles but as decision-makers with authority to evaluate candidates. Compensation structures must reflect that lived experience expertise holds equivalent value to credentialed professional knowledge, not token recognition.

    Build accountable partnerships that redistribute epistemic authority. Genuine partnership requires structural authority over knowledge production and decision-making, not symbolic consultation. This means boards of directors include system-impacted members with full voting rights and compensation. It means community members participate in budget decisions with actual authority to redirect resources based on their knowledge of what works and what causes harm. It means program design begins with community-defined problems rather than professionally identified needs. It means evaluation metrics are determined by those most affected by the work, recognizing their knowledge as authoritative in defining success and failure. Organizations must accept that authentic partnership requires professionals to relinquish monopoly control over which knowledge counts as valid in shaping systems.

    Make macro practice visible as knowledge work, not just service delivery. Social work’s public invisibility in systems change work reflects choices about what the profession emphasizes in public communications, media engagement, and professional development. Analysis of media portrayals shows heavy concentration on child welfare casework and therapy, with policy advocacy and community organizing largely absent. Professional organizations must feature macro work prominently in public messaging, framing it as rigorous knowledge production about how systems function and how they can be changed. Educational programs must showcase macro career pathways as intellectually demanding knowledge work, not niche specializations for the idealistic. Social workers in macro roles must be visible and vocal about how lived experience knowledge informs their analysis and advocacy.

    Invest in macro infrastructure as epistemic infrastructure. The economic logic that favors clinical investment is self-fulfilling. Clinical practice generates immediate, billable revenue. Macro practice requires infrastructure investment with diffuse, long-term returns. Breaking this cycle requires funders and organizations to invest in policy positions, organizing capacity, and advocacy infrastructure even when those investments do not produce immediate measurable outcomes. Critically, this investment must explicitly support the development of lived experience knowledge authority, including peer consultation structures, community-led evaluation frameworks, and knowledge-sharing networks that recognize experiential expertise. It means subsidizing macro field placements when agencies cannot afford dedicated supervision. It means creating professional development opportunities, practice associations, and career pathways that support macro workers in building and exercising epistemic authority over time.

    None of this is comfortable. Comfort with existing arrangements of knowledge authority is one of the forces sustaining the spiral. These interventions require credentialed professionals to relinquish epistemic monopoly, organizations to redistribute decision-making power, and educational institutions to fundamentally rethink whose knowledge counts as rigorous and authoritative.

    What This Framework Makes Possible

    The epistemic erosion spiral is not a complete theory of social work’s challenges. It is a diagnostic framework that makes visible a pattern many practitioners recognize but struggle to name. It explains why systems change remains elusive despite widespread agreement that it matters. It clarifies why legitimacy and epistemic authority, rather than funding alone, constitute the binding constraints. It shows how the systematic exclusion of lived experience knowledge actively undermines macro effectiveness in ways that then justify further clinical investment and epistemic marginalization.

    If this pattern remains unaddressed, social work will continue reproducing the very legitimacy crisis that prevents it from fulfilling its mission. Communities already harmed by helping professionals will remain excluded from exercising epistemic authority over the systems that shape their lives. The profession will continue asking why systems change feels perpetually out of reach despite shared commitment to justice.

    That is not a resource problem. It is a crisis of legitimacy, knowledge authority, and power. And it requires solutions that address those dimensions directly.

    The full academic paper with complete citations and additional framework detail is available on SSRN. Educators, researchers, and macro practitioners are invited to use and adapt the framework in their work.

  • Policy Analysis 101: How to Read, Understand, and Influence Legislation

    Empty legislative chamber illustrating policy analysis and how policy decisions are often made without practitioner input.

    Policy analysis is often treated as optional in social work, even though it determines the conditions under which practice occurs.

    Most social workers avoid policy work. It feels like the territory of lawyers and lobbyists, dense with jargon that seems designed to keep regular people out. That perception is not irrational. Most of us were trained to stabilize crises, not decode statutes. Many agencies do not protect time for policy engagement. Many supervisors discourage anything that looks “political.” And if you are already carrying high acuity work, policy can feel like a luxury you can’t afford.

    There is also a quieter barrier. Policy work can feel abstract when your day is urgent. It is hard to think about committee assignments when you are trying to keep a family housed, a student safe, or a discharge plan from collapsing.

    But this avoidance also serves those who benefit from the status quo. When practitioners step back from policy, decisions affecting clients get made without the people who understand implementation, unintended consequences, and how harm actually shows up.

    Policy shapes everything you encounter. It determines which families receive support and which face investigation. It defines who qualifies for housing and who remains homeless. It decides what gets funded, what outcomes count, and which populations get quietly excluded. Many daily frustrations you experience are not practice failures. They are predictable outcomes of policy decisions made without your input.

    You do not need a law degree to understand how legislation works or where to intervene. What you need is a framework for reading policy critically, identifying leverage points, and recognizing gaps between what laws promise and what they deliver.

    Why This Skill Matters Now

    Social work claims commitment to justice and systems change, yet most practitioners are trained almost exclusively for individual intervention. This is not a values failure. It is a preparation failure.

    If you have been reading The Macro Lens, you know the pattern. The profession is saturated in clinical language and individual-level technique, while systems-level literacy remains optional. We keep producing highly skilled crisis managers, then wonder why the crises stay structurally predictable.

    Without policy analysis skills, you remain reactive. You address immediate crises while the conditions creating those crises go untouched. Over time, this disconnect drives frustration, moral distress, and burnout.

    This pattern appears across settings:

    • Child welfare: Caseworkers manage impossible caseloads under policies that prioritize removal over prevention. Families cycle through systems that rarely address housing, poverty, or violence, then get labeled resistant when they cannot comply with requirements that assume stability they do not have.
    • Schools: Social workers operate inside discipline frameworks that treat trauma responses as misconduct. Policy choices shape what counts as “safety,” who gets excluded, and whether support looks like care or control.
    • Healthcare: Social workers watch insurance regulations deny necessary treatment while “medical necessity” becomes a rationing tool. You are tasked with coordinating services that policy has fragmented by design.
    • Housing: Advocates confront zoning rules that block affordability and eligibility systems that reward documentation over need. Support becomes conditional, slow, and often punitive, even when the crisis is structural.

    Policy analysis changes this dynamic. It moves you upstream to intervene where change is possible rather than endlessly managing fallout.

    Understanding Bill Structure

    Federal legislation follows predictable patterns. House bills use H.R. prefixes, Senate bills use S. Numbers indicate introduction order within that congressional session.

    Pay attention to definitions sections. How legislation defines “family,” “eligible individual,” “qualified provider,” or “evidence-based” determines who gets access and who gets excluded. Narrow definitions of family can erase kinship care structures. Narrow definitions of provider can block trusted community organizations from eligibility. “Evidence-based” can be used to protect quality, or to exclude interventions that work but have never been resourced well enough to be studied.

    Amendatory language often hides the real action. When bills change existing law, the text appears in quotation marks. “By striking” signals removals. “By inserting” means additions. One buried sentence can undo protections that the title claims to strengthen.

    Authorization of appropriations sections specify permitted funding levels and fiscal years. Authorization does not guarantee funding. Programs can exist on paper without receiving a dollar. If you have ever been told “the law requires this” while your agency has no resources to implement it, you have lived this distinction.

    Effective date provisions determine when requirements begin. Some laws take effect immediately. Others phase in over years or wait for agency action. Timelines shape implementation, especially when agencies are expected to build infrastructure with no ramp-up support.

    State legislation follows similar patterns. Most state legislative websites provide structure guides and bill tracking tools.

    Reading Beyond the Text

    Critical policy analysis requires attention to context, not just language.

    • Check sponsorship: Who introduced the bill? Who cosponsored? Their priorities and voting patterns offer clues about intent and passage likelihood. Congress.gov provides this for federal bills. State legislatures typically offer similar tracking.
    • Identify committee assignment: Most bills die in committee. Knowing which committee has jurisdiction and who leads it often matters more than floor debate. Committee websites list members, hearing schedules, and prior actions.
    • Track amendments: Bills change substantially during the process. Amendments can strengthen protections or gut enforcement while leaving headlines intact. Congress.gov tracks versions as bills evolve.
    • Notice what is missing: Policies often avoid explicit language about enforcement, accountability, or adequate funding. Those omissions signal where political will was insufficient, or where bills are designed to look responsive without shifting power.
    • Find expert analysis: Congressional Research Service reports provide nonpartisan background on federal policy. CRS reports are freely available and searchable at Congress.gov. Type “CRS” plus your policy topic into the search bar. If you cannot access a report directly, look for committee summaries and reputable legislative analyses that cite CRS work. These sources often highlight the sections that matter most.

    Three Questions That Expose Reality

    Move past surface claims. Ask harder questions.

    Who Benefits and Who Bears the Cost?

    Every policy distributes resources and burdens. Follow money and authority. Who administers the program? Who decides eligibility? Who gets paid, and who gets monitored?

    Consider homeless services funding. Legislation might authorize supportive housing. Critical analysis asks: Who controls unit access? What requirements must people meet? How are those requirements enforced? Who profits from construction and operations? Which communities bear the burden of concentrated service infrastructure?

    A policy can sound compassionate while reinforcing gatekeeping. Funding routed only through traditional institutions sidelines community providers. Compliance requirements can convert support into surveillance. When this happens, the policy is not simply imperfect. It is functioning as designed.

    Where Are the Implementation Gaps?

    Laws describe what should happen. Implementation determines what actually happens.

    Look for vague language like “appropriate services,” “reasonable efforts,” or “as determined by the agency.” Vague language creates discretion that becomes policy in practice, shaped by budgets, risk tolerance, and institutional culture.

    Check enforcement mechanisms. Who monitors implementation? What happens when requirements are violated? If enforcement depends on the same agencies whose behavior the policy is meant to change, expect drift.

    Then examine capacity assumptions. Does the law assume staffing, infrastructure, or expertise that does not exist? Mandates for culturally competent services mean little if funding does not support hiring, training, language access, and community partnership. Requirements for coordination fail when agencies lack interoperable systems or incentives to cooperate.

    What Assumptions About Deservingness Are Embedded?

    Eligibility rules, compliance mandates, and sanctions reveal what policymakers believe about who deserves support and under what conditions.

    Documentation requirements, residency restrictions, sobriety mandates, and behavioral compliance rules often function as moral sorting mechanisms. They may be framed as accountability, but they frequently operate as exclusion.

    Notice how policies handle noncompliance. Harsh penalties signal assumptions that deprivation motivates behavior change. Evidence rarely supports this. Also notice who was consulted. Policies written with meaningful input from affected communities look different from policies built by experts who have never lived the conditions being legislated.

    Finding Your Leverage Points

    Early engagement works best. During drafting, legislators and staff often lack practical insight. Your input can prevent harmful design choices. Contact your representative’s office and ask for the staffer covering the relevant portfolio, then offer implementation-based feedback rather than abstract opinion.

    Committee processes offer access. Hearings allow public testimony. Written testimony reaches staff even without speaking slots. Find hearing schedules on committee websites and submit written comments addressing specific provisions. If you can only do one thing, name one design flaw and one fix.

    Amendments create openings. Targeted amendments can fix problems without derailing broader legislation. If a bill is moving, improving it often works better than trying to stop it. Work with sympathetic legislators on narrow changes that reduce harm or strengthen enforcement.

    Implementation rules matter as much as statutes. Agencies develop regulations to implement legislation. Public comment periods are real leverage points. Agencies must respond to substantive concerns. Use regulations.gov for federal rules or your state’s administrative code website.

    Budget processes determine reality. Authorization does not guarantee funding. Appropriations committees decide whether programs function or fail. Track budget markup hearings and public input windows. Tie funding arguments to staffing, infrastructure, and compliance capacity.

    Monitoring creates accountability. Document implementation failures systematically. Share documentation with legislative offices and oversight committees. A clear pattern is often more persuasive than a broad critique.

    Understanding Power Dynamics

    Start by identifying who has decision authority over your issue. For federal legislation, this might be a committee chair or influential member. For state and local issues, identify the specific council member, commissioner, or agency head.

    Then map the influence network. Decision makers respond to staff, donors, constituent groups, and organized interests. Staff control access and shape what the decision maker hears.

    Create a simple power map. Put the decision maker at the center. Around them, list staff members with relevant portfolios, constituencies they prioritize, major donors, organizations they consult, and officials whose opinions they value. Mark each as ally, opponent, or unengaged.

    Then ask one additional question that turns the map into strategy: what does each influence node need in order to move? Some need political cover. Some need credible implementation detail. Some need a narrative that fits their priorities. Some need to see that the public will notice.

    This tells you where to spend energy. Many advocates waste months arguing with opponents while ignoring the staffer drafting language or the undecided member who could be moved.

    Identify what type of power matters in your situation. Formal authority matters, but so do expertise, relationships, economic leverage, and moral credibility. Social workers often underestimate their implementation credibility, especially when organized collectively.

    From Analysis to Action

    Analysis without action leaves systems intact. The steps below outline practical ways to begin engaging in policy change in your community, at the state level, or nationally.

    • Start local: City councils, school boards, and county commissions make decisions with immediate impact. Most local government websites publish meeting agendas and public comment procedures. Start there.
    • Build staff relationships: Legislative and agency staff rely on practitioners to understand real-world implications. Consistent engagement builds credibility. Offer to serve as an implementation resource, and follow through.
    • Join coalitions: Effective advocacy rarely succeeds alone. Search “[your issue] advocacy coalition” plus your state, or ask your state NASW chapter for recommendations. Coalitions multiply reach, legitimacy, and political leverage while reducing individual burden.
    • Document systematically: Track patterns, not just stories. Patterns show design flaws. Stories show stakes. Both matter.
    • Engage rulemaking: Public comments influence how laws are applied. Specific, evidence-based feedback carries weight, especially when it references implementation realities and unintended consequences.
    • Provide testimony: Keep oral testimony under five minutes, written testimony under three pages. Anchor testimony in a decision point, not general critique. Tie recommendations to specific bill sections.

    Common Mistakes to Avoid

    Many policy efforts fail not because of lack of commitment, but because predictable mistakes go unrecognized. Here are common pitfalls to avoid:

    • Do not assume stated intentions reflect actual outcomes. Analyze impact, not rhetoric.
    • Do not focus only on statutory text. Implementation, funding, and enforcement often shape reality more than legislative language.
    • Do not ignore power dynamics. Evidence alone rarely changes policy without organized influence.
    • Do not sideline affected communities. Policies developed without meaningful community input routinely fail.
    • Do not pursue perfect over strategic. The question is whether a compromise reduces harm or merely preserves optics.

    Making This Part of Your Practice

    You do not need permission to analyze legislation affecting your clients. You do not need special credentials to submit public comment or testify. You do not need institutional backing to join coalitions.

    Start with one policy connected to your work. Read it closely using this framework. Ask who benefits, who bears costs, and where it breaks down. Identify who holds power. Show up where decisions get made.

    Your practice knowledge matters. Communities deserve advocates who understand both immediate need and structural design. Policy analysis gives you tools to address both.

    The profession needs practitioners who can move between individual experience and systemic analysis, who can translate practice knowledge into policy language, and who can challenge structures producing harm. That practitioner can be you.

    For additional resources on building macro practice skills, visit our Macro Social Work Resource Hub.

  • Thrown Into the Fire: The Unintentional Exploitation of Lived Experience Workers

    A lived experience worker sitting alone in a hospital hallway, overwhelmed, illustrating the lack of protection and support provided to lived experience workers in demanding systems.

    The Pattern

    Marcus had been in the peer specialist role for eight months when the panic attacks started. Not at home. Not during his off hours. Right there on the hospital floor, standing in the medication room, his heart hammering as a patient’s story collided with memories he thought he had processed years ago.

    His supervisor meant well. “You’re doing great work,” she’d say during their monthly check-ins. But those sessions never touched what Marcus was actually experiencing. How the lack of clear boundaries left him answering texts from clients at 10 p.m. How the clinical staff kept asking him to do “just this one assessment” because they were short-staffed. How he couldn’t find words for the exhaustion that felt different from anything he’d known before.

    Marcus isn’t alone. Across the United States, organizations are recognizing the profound value that lived experience workers bring to behavioral health, child welfare, substance use recovery, and social services. The research is clear and compelling. Peer specialists reduce hospital readmissions by 56 percent. One county found they help cut involuntary hospitalizations by 32 percent, generating nearly two million dollars in savings in a single year. The evidence keeps mounting.

    But something is breaking in the space between that recognition and the reality workers like Marcus face every day.

    When Speed Outpaces Safety

    Last week, a leader in the lived experience space shared a metaphor with me that I continue coming back to. It captures a consistent pattern I have observed across child welfare, juvenile justice, and the broader social service sector. Too often, well-meaning stakeholders throw individuals with lived experience “into the fire, figuratively and sometimes literally.” Systems recognize the value of lived experience without understanding its burden, rushing implementation without considering the support needed to protect those doing the work.

    The behavioral health field has learned to hire lived experience workers quickly. A short training program. A certification process. Add them to the team. National peer workforce guidance suggests the infrastructure can be built more quickly than other workforce pipelines.

    What the field has not learned is how to build the support systems at the same speed.

    Research reveals a troubling pattern. Organizations often hire peer workers before establishing clear policies and procedures. They bring people on board without conducting readiness assessments that best practices explicitly recommend. Job qualifications, functions, and pay grades are determined after hiring begins, if at all. Supervision structures and organizational policies are still being drafted while workers are already carrying caseloads.

    The numbers tell a sobering story. In one study, 91 percent of peer supporters identified challenges to being effective in their roles. The top challenges were excessive workload, inadequate time, and personal stress. These are not minor inconveniences. They are symptoms of systems that skipped the preparation work necessary to protect the people they recruited.

    Sarah, a peer recovery worker in a substance use treatment program, describes the reality. “They hired me on a Monday. By Wednesday, I was carrying a caseload of twelve clients with complex trauma histories. My supervisor had never supervised a peer worker before and wasn’t sure what questions to ask. I had a list of people to see and no real guidance on how to navigate situations that felt overwhelming.”

    The Hidden Cost of Emotional Labor

    The exploitation at the heart of this dynamic is rarely intentional. Organizations are not deliberately trying to harm the workers they hire. They are trying to do better, to be more responsive, and to incorporate perspectives that have been excluded for too long. The harm emerges from the gap between good intentions and inadequate preparation.

    Consider what research tells us about the unique vulnerabilities lived experience workers face. Approximately 70 percent of therapists working with trauma clients are at high risk for secondary traumatic stress. About 38 percent of social workers experience moderate to severe secondary trauma. For peer workers, who often lack the formal clinical training and protective distance that comes with professional roles, the risk compounds. When peers have trauma histories similar to their clients, which is often the foundational qualification for the role, the risk of re-traumatization and over-identification increases dramatically.

    One peer worker explained: “Every story I heard had echoes of my own. My supervisor kept telling me I was ‘using my lived experience well,’ but nobody ever checked whether I had the support I needed to manage what that was stirring up in me.”

    The research on secondary traumatic stress makes clear that it affects every domain of functioning. Social relationships suffer. Work performance declines. Family connections strain. Sexual health impacts emerge. Psychological wellbeing deteriorates. The emotional and physical toll becomes comprehensive. For lived experience workers whose roles are explicitly tied to their own recovery, the stakes feel impossibly high.

    The Supervision Gap

    Buried in the research is a finding that should alarm every organization employing lived experience workers. Many supervisors receive no formal training in supervision skills. People responsible for supporting workers in one of the most emotionally demanding roles in behavioral health often have never been trained to provide supervision.

    The gap becomes even more pronounced with peer workers. Research shows that non-peer supervisors commonly lack knowledge of what peer support work actually entails. They are supervising roles they do not fully understand. This results in a striking disconnect: supervisors often report confidence in understanding the peer role, while peer workers report their supervisors do not actually understand what they do.

    Maria, a peer specialist in a mental health clinic, captures this disconnect. “My supervisor is a licensed clinical social worker. She’s brilliant at what she does. But when I tried to explain why I needed to show up differently than the therapists on our team, she looked confused. She kept redirecting me back to clinical frameworks. I wasn’t speaking a language she understood.”

    The lack of supervision infrastructure manifests in predictable ways. Supervisors are often unsure what peer specialists should actually be doing. Role ambiguity becomes the norm rather than the exception. More than half of peer workers report poor treatment in the workplace, including discrimination and microaggressions related specifically to their peer status. When supervisors do not understand the role well enough to protect it, workers become vulnerable to being pulled in directions that compromise the very thing that makes their contribution valuable.

    The Training That Never Comes

    Organizations that employ peer workers consistently identify training as essential to effective practice. Yet respondents across multiple studies report feeling inadequately prepared for the specific skills their work requires, particularly advocacy, outreach, and boundary navigation.

    The pattern repeats. Workers are hired quickly. Training is promised. Deployment happens first. Preparation comes later, if it comes at all.

    When peers do not receive training before deployment, the quality of peer support declines. Workers struggle. The people they serve receive inconsistent support. Teams become frustrated. Peer workers often internalize the dysfunction as personal failure rather than systemic neglect.

    Professional development suffers in parallel, with limited access to continuing education or potential for career advancement. Despite growing evidence of impact, lived experience roles are treated as entry points rather than professional tracks deserving long-term investment.

    A Delphi consultation of 110 international participants identified five core training topics with strong consensus. Yet peer worker wellbeing training, despite universal recognition of its importance, remains inadequately addressed. Organizations acknowledge what is needed. They simply do not provide it.

    The Burnout Crisis

    The workforce literature uses clinical language to describe what is happening. Compassion fatigue. Secondary traumatic stress. Vicarious trauma. Lived experience workers often use different words. Exhaustion. Emptiness. The feeling of having nothing left to give. Some describe reaching a point where their own recovery felt threatened by the work they were hired to do because of their recovery.

    The statistics are stark. 93 percent of behavioral health workers have experienced burnout, with 62 percent reporting moderate to severe levels. 23 percent of peer recovery workers report being under stress or experiencing burnout symptoms. For younger peer workers, the numbers climb higher. Many have left their positions entirely due to burnout and traumatic experiences from the work itself.

    Emotional exhaustion among peer providers strongly correlates with intent to leave the field entirely, not just to change jobs. Some peer providers are forced out due to health deterioration from work stress, citing disability-level impacts. Organizations lose experienced workers at the moment retention matters most.

    James, who left his peer specialist role after fourteen months, remembers the breaking point. “I started having nightmares about clients. I couldn’t sleep. I was snapping at my partner over nothing. My doctor wanted to adjust my medications. I realized the job that was supposed to be part of my healing journey was making me sicker. So I left. And I felt like I’d failed.”

    The Screening That Does Not Happen

    Perhaps the most troubling gap in the research is what is not happening at all. Limited standardized protocols exist for screening peer workers for trauma history, burnout risk, or boundary vulnerability before they begin.

    Consider that reality. The behavioral health field has extensive screening protocols for clinical staff. Assessment tools for therapist burnout. Guidelines for managing countertransference.

    In contrast, peer workers rarely receive this protective screening. They are hired with the implicit understanding that their trauma history is an asset, with little consideration for how that same history might make them more vulnerable to specific harms.

    Research shows that rejection sensitivity, often grounded in histories of loss and trauma, significantly impacts organizational attachment and turnover. Yet organizations rarely screen for this or provide support to help workers navigate it. Resilience is assumed rather than built.

    The Economics of Extraction

    Follow the money and the pattern becomes clearer. Organizations achieve substantial cost savings through peer services. Hospital readmission rates drop. Acute inpatient days decrease. Systems reap financial benefits.

    At the same time, peer recovery workers consistently report low wages and workplace stress that leads to burnout and compassion fatigue. Pay is unstable. Roles are poorly defined. Emotional exhaustion threatens workforce stability.

    The inequity is palpable. Organizations capture value while making minimal investment in the people generating it. Peer workers are sidelined, siloed, or asked to perform tasks that do not reflect their role. Regardless of intent, the disconnect between value extracted and support provided represents a form of systemic exploitation.

    What Harm Looks Like in Practice

    The research documents recurring organizational failures.

    Clinical environments lack recovery orientation. Peer workers are placed in settings where dominant cultures contradict peer values. Stigma and marginalization become part of the work environment.

    Role clarity remains absent. Decision-makers do not understand peer responsibilities, yet peer satisfaction depends critically on that understanding.

    Policies arrive too late. Some organizations pilot peer services while internal policies are still under development, leaving workers unprotected during the most vulnerable phase.

    Leadership doubts capabilities while expanding the workforce. Administrators question whether training can compensate for a lifetime of struggle even as they continue hiring without adequate support.

    A Different Path Forward

    The solution is not to stop employing lived experience workers. Their contributions are too valuable. The solution is to refuse to hire without first building the infrastructure to support them.

    Establishing organizational readiness:

    Conducting genuine readiness assessments before recruitment begins. Establishing job qualifications, functions, and pay grades before posting positions. Ensuring supervision structures exist with supervisors trained specifically in peer support. Developing clear policies about scope, boundaries, and team integration before anyone starts work.

    Protecting workers proactively:

    Screening for vulnerabilities just as rigorously as for any other high-risk role. Pre-deployment assessment of trauma history. Explicit discussion of boundary challenges. Identification of potential triggers. Creation of wellbeing plans before workers encounter situations that compromise their health.

    Investing in professional development:

    Providing ongoing training, not just initial certification. Creating professional development pathways. Ensuring access to continuing education. Building clear career advancement structures that signal this is professional work deserving professional support.

    Ensuring adequate compensation:

    Paying wages that reflect both the value these workers provide and the emotional labor they perform. Translating the cost savings organizations achieve through peer services into compensation that acknowledges the role’s complexity and demands.

    Building appropriate supervision:

    Creating peer-informed supervision even when peer supervisors are not available. Training non-peer supervisors in the values and practices of peer support. Ensuring every peer worker has access to some form of peer-to-peer supervision or mentorship, contracted externally if necessary.

    Slowing down:

    The urgency to capture the value of lived experience has outpaced the commitment to protect the people providing it. Organizations must stop treating lived experience workers as quick fixes for workforce shortages. They are professionals whose wellbeing matters as much as the outcomes they help achieve.

    The Moral Question

    At its core, this pattern raises a fundamental ethical question. Can organizations call themselves trauma-informed and recovery-oriented while failing to protect the workers whose trauma and recovery they rely on?

    Good intentions are not sufficient. Recognition of value is not protection. Inclusion without infrastructure becomes another form of harm.

    Every organization currently employing lived experience workers should conduct an honest assessment:

    • Do peer workers have access to supervisors trained in peer-specific supervision approaches?
    • Are clear policies in place about scope of practice, boundaries, and role clarity?
    • Has screening been conducted for trauma history and vulnerability factors?
    • Do professional development pathways exist with clear opportunities for advancement?
    • Are wages competitive with the value these workers provide?
    • Is peer-to-peer supervision available, either internally or through external arrangements?
    • Have non-peer team members been prepared to support and respect the peer role?
    • Are workload and caseload expectations realistic given the emotional demands of the work?

    If the answer to any of these questions is no, the organization is participating in a pattern of unintentional exploitation that places workers at risk.

    The Fire Still Burns

    Marcus eventually left his peer specialist position. Not because he stopped believing in the work, but because the foundation never materialized. He realized staying meant sacrificing his own wellbeing.

    He thinks about it sometimes, the promise his supervisor made during the interview. “We’re building something special here. You’ll be part of creating a new model.” What they built, he realizes now, was a role without a foundation. A position without protection. An expectation of resilience without the support that makes resilience possible.

    Organizations across the country continue making similar promises. They recognize value. They recruit with enthusiasm. They deploy faster than they prepare.

    The question is not whether lived experience workers have something essential to offer. The evidence is irrefutable.

    The question is whether organizations are willing to do the harder work of building systems that protect the people they ask to step into the fire. Until the answer is yes, each hiring decision risks unintentional harm, no matter how good the intentions behind it.

    If you enjoyed this article, check out our foundational articles: Why Us?, Why Now?, and How? Be sure to subscribe for monthly updates and resources.

  • Deafening Silence: NASW Restructuring and the Fear of Speaking Up

    A political cartoon showing a large NASW chair at the head of a boardroom table facing two gagged chapter leaders labeled NASW IA and NASW CA, with six empty labeled chairs for NASW KY, NASW AR, NASW KS, NASW AZ, NASW SD, and NASW TN to represent directors removed during the NASW restructuring.

    This piece is an unplanned follow up, written in response to the extraordinary volume of feedback to my previous article. You may wish to read that analysis first for full context.

    Editor’s Note (6:20 pm December 11, 2025): This article has been updated to include formal letters from NASW Texas and Michigan chapters, to correct Dr. Gandarilla-Javier’s title, to add context from a September 2024 board statement, and to reflect verification of the December 8 email.

    NASW Restructuring Article Response

    On Friday, I published an analysis of the November NASW restructuring decision. The response revealed something I did not fully anticipate: the gap between what social workers wanted to say and what they felt they could say publicly. Therein lies the true story.

    Within hours, messages arrived from former chapter directors who felt discarded by the organization they had faithfully served for years. Former national staff confirmed what many suspected. Current leaders explained that they could not speak publicly for fear of retaliation. Anonymous Reddit discussions became the only spaces where practitioners could name what they had witnessed.

    The response confirmed what the restructuring itself revealed: a profession struggling with the distance between its stated values and its organizational practice.

    A Systemic Pattern, Not an Isolated Crisis

    The November 2025 restructuring did not emerge from nowhere. It sits inside a longer pattern of conflict, silence, and contested governance.

    Last year, NASW Vice President and National Board member Dr. Sharon Gandarilla-Javier publicly announced her resignation. Her original LinkedIn statement was edited multiple times within hours, then reduced to a single sentence. A preserved copy on Reddit describes her account of being pressured to resign after questioning CEO Anthony Estreet’s handling of the Preferra insurance collapse. In that statement, she alleged serious concerns about workplace climate, financial management, and retaliation, and stated that her duty of loyalty lay with the organization’s mission rather than any individual leader.

    Context for her resignation appears in an earlier September 2024 board statement defending CEO Anthony Estreet against what they characterized as ‘maliciously published’ and ‘alleged unfounded grievances.’ The board stated they stood ‘firmly behind Dr. Estreet and the leadership team as they address these challenges head on.’ Three months later, the Vice President resigned after questioning the CEO’s handling of the Preferra crisis.

    Whether these allegations will ultimately be substantiated is a matter for investigation. What matters here is the pattern: a sitting Vice President described pressure to resign after raising concerns, and her attempt to speak publicly about it was quickly constrained and then largely erased. That context helps explain why so many people now fear speaking out.

    The pattern continued. Boards in Arkansas, South Dakota, and Kentucky resigned in full. Iowa’s chapter issued a vote of no confidence citing opaque decision-making and concerns about retaliation. Kansas publicly challenged the removal of its director and the absence of clear process.

    Taken together, these events suggest more than a single controversial decision. They point toward systemic governance failure.

    The Scope Becomes Clear

    Since the November restructuring, at least seven state chapters have taken formal institutional action challenging national leadership’s decisions and governance practices.

    Iowa issued a vote of no confidence citing opaque decision-making and concerns about retaliation. Kansas publicly challenged the removal of its director. Board members in Arkansas, South Dakota, and Kentucky resigned in full rather than continue under the current structure.

    This week, two additional major chapters formalized their positions. The NASW Texas Executive Board, representing one of NASW’s largest and most active chapters, issued a vote of no confidence in executive leadership. The NASW Michigan Board, representing 5,000 members and over 32,000 licensed social workers in the state, issued a unanimous vote of no confidence and explicitly called for the resignation of both the CEO and Board President if immediate corrective action is not taken.

    Both letters make nearly identical demands:

    • Financial transparency, including five years of financials and third-party audit
    • Full account of restructuring decision-making process
    • Establishment of independent steering committee with chapter representation
    • Publication of board agendas, minutes, and voting records
    • Written acknowledgment and action plan within 14 days

    Texas’s letter notes a particularly important ethical dimension: “Texas social workers expect NASW to champion fair labor practices, reasonable workloads, transparency, and member-centered policy decisions. Yet the recent restructuring asks Executive Directors to absorb multi-state responsibilities without adequate compensation, staffing, or structural support.”

    Michigan’s letter is even more direct in its assessment: “At this time, the NASW–Michigan Board finds that these standards are not being upheld.”

    These are not anonymous complaints. These are formal institutional statements from elected chapter leadership, representing tens of thousands of social workers, using their organizational authority to demand accountability.

    Like-minded members can join NASW Texas’ sign-on letter, reflecting many of the concerns listed above.

    What the Numbers Reveal

    Many assumed NASW’s restructuring reflected financial collapse or mass membership loss following the Preferra insurance crisis. Yet NASW’s own IRS Form 990 filings do not support that narrative. Membership dues revenue over the past four fiscal years (ending June 30) remained stable:

    • $18.81 million in FY 2021
    • $19.15 million in FY 2022
    • $19.37 million in FY 2023
    • $19.42 million in FY 2024

    While growth plateaued, the data show neither catastrophic membership decline nor fiscal emergency. Unless something catastrophic occurred between June 2024 (the fiscal year end in the 2024 filing) and November 2025, recent decisions do not appear driven by financial necessity.

    The broader financial picture further undermines claims of crisis. NASW’s total revenue and expenses over the same period show an organization that operated at or near break-even:

    • FY 2021: Net income of $2.22 million
    • FY 2022: Net income of $6.23 million
    • FY 2023: Net loss of $269,000
    • FY 2024: Net income of $39,000

    Three of the past four years showed positive net income. This marks a significant improvement over the prior seven fiscal years (2014-2020), which each recorded net losses ranging from $1.48 million to $3.35 million annually.

    If the restructuring were in response to imminent collapse, the data would reflect crisis. They do not. Financial performance from 2021 through 2024 shows stabilization, not emergency.

    This matters because it clarifies what the restructuring was not:

    • It was not forced by sudden collapse in dues
    • It was not a last-resort austerity response
    • It was not an emergency measure to keep the organization afloat

    This reframes the issue entirely. If not compelled by financial necessity, it must be understood as a matter of choice.

    Why choose an approach that bypassed chapter leadership, ignored participatory governance expectations, and dismantled state advocacy infrastructure without transparent explanation?

    The numbers do not justify the method. They instead reveal a deeper concern: a top-down governance decision carried out without regard for NASW’s own Code of Ethics.

    When Voice Requires Risk

    “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
    — Maya Angelou

    Directors and leaders who reached out did not only describe disagreement. They described grief.

    One person wrote about spending years building legislative relationships, then learning of their termination only when the public announcement went out. Another described watching their board resign in protest while being bound by confidentiality agreements that limited what they could say publicly.

    The termination of fourteen executive directors severed years of relational trust with legislators, coalitions, community partners, and state agencies. It also revealed a deeper dynamic: critiquing NASW National now carries professional risk.

    Current staff shared concerns about job security and potential retaliation. Former staff referenced NDAs and policies warning of legal consequences for sharing internal information. Chapter leaders described calculating how public they could be without jeopardizing future opportunities.

    Social workers are trained to speak truth to power. When they feel unable to do that within their own professional home, the issue is not individual courage. It is organizational culture.

    Stay informed on macro leadership and ethical accountability

    Subscribe below for analysis on this moment and other systemic questions shaping social work. I share macro practice context, reflections, and resources to support your work.

    What Social Workers Shared Privately

    Across direct messages, emails, comment threads, and anonymous forums, several themes repeated with striking consistency:

    Betrayal of professional values

    Social workers asked how an organization that teaches transparency can function without it. Many referenced the Code of Ethics directly. One former director wrote: “I taught students about ethical decision-making for years. Now I’m watching our own association make decisions I would have told students to challenge.”

    Loss of advocacy capacity

    State-level advocacy cannot be centralized without cost. It is relationship-based. It requires local trust and daily presence. Directors who built those relationships over years were removed with no transition planning. Practitioners worried about coalitions, policy campaigns, and community partnerships that depend on steady local leadership.

    Fear of retaliation

    This theme dominated. Not primarily anger or outrage, but fear. People described deleting posts after second thoughts, moving conversations into private messages, or choosing anonymous forums because they felt safer. A current chapter leader wrote: “I know what happened was wrong. I also know I can’t say that publicly without risking my position.”

    Organizational trauma and grief

    Many used language of loss, rupture, and betrayal. They spoke of years of work made irrelevant overnight. They described watching an institution that was supposed to protect their advocacy instead dismantle the infrastructure that made it possible.

    The Silence Is the Story

    For every public statement, there were several private messages. Comments appeared, then disappeared. Former staff wrote publicly, then removed their posts. Reddit became one of the few places where practitioners could speak without attaching their names.

    Silence, in this context, is not neutrality. It is evidence of power. When people believe that telling the truth about their experience may cost them their livelihood, silence becomes protective. The profession should be deeply concerned any time silence is the safest choice.

    When Public Messaging Contradicts Private Reality

    On December 9, a document appeared on Reddit, shared by someone identifying as a recently resigned NASW chapter board member. The post included an email from NASW National leadership dated December 8, which I have since independently verified through direct communication with affected parties.

    In that message, NASW leadership asserts that the restructuring was neither sudden nor reactive, but the result of “nearly a decade” of planning, pilots, and incremental testing. The communication frames the consolidation of 14 chapters as necessary operational modernization rather than an ethical rupture or governance breakdown. It directs members to board minutes and Form 990 filings as evidence of transparency and due process.

    The response from the community has been swift and skeptical. The resigned board member characterizes the messaging not as clarification, but as post-hoc justification, writing:

    “To put the blame on social workers for not being ‘informed enough’ is simply ludicrous”.

    Others in the discussion attempted to verify the leadership’s claims of long-term transparency. One user noted that publicly available board minutes on the NASW website appear to extend only through January of this year. This leaves the claim of a “decade of planning” effectively unverifiable to the average member.

    This critique does not hinge on whether restructuring was necessary. It hinges on timing and access. In trauma-informed systems, transparency is not a courtesy extended afterward; it is the process that precedes impact.

    Public messaging that invokes openness while leaving members unable to verify foundational claims creates the mistrust it seeks to quiet. In social work, transparency is not merely disclosure of outcomes. It is shared process, shared risk, and the ability to ask questions without consequence.

    What is most striking is the contrast. Leadership points to board minutes and filings as evidence of transparency, yet those materials appear incomplete and the financial record (as shown above) contradicts claims of necessity. This is transparency as performance, not practice.

    The restructuring may have been justified. The communication culture that surrounded it was not. That is the ethical breach that continues to reverberate.

    Governance, Stewardship, and Professional Legitimacy

    This is no longer only a crisis about restructuring. It is a crisis of credibility and stewardship.

    In nonprofit governance, three duties are foundational: duty of care, duty of loyalty, and duty of obedience. These duties belong to an organization’s governing board at the national level, not its executives.

    When an organization’s Vice President, who serves on the National Board, describes facing pressure to resign after raising concerns related to governance and transparency, it signals a serious breach of fiduciary responsibility. Board members are obligated to ask hard questions and act in the best interest of the organization’s mission, even when doing so is uncomfortable or unpopular.

    Separately, when chapter boards resign in full, they are not simply rebelling. They are signaling that they can no longer participate in governance under a structure they believe undermines transparency, ethical practice, and meaningful accountability to members.

    An association cannot ask its members to uphold a Code of Ethics it ignores in its own operations. Doing so undermines the moral authority of our entire profession.

    Clinical Drift in Organizational Form

    Macro practice teaches that institutions must be accountable to the communities they serve. Social workers learn to analyze systems, challenge harmful power dynamics, and build participatory structures.

    If social workers cannot successfully advocate within their own professional association, how do we maintain credibility when we advocate in legislatures, agencies, and communities? If chapter leaders fear retaliation for naming concerns, how do we encourage practitioners to challenge injustice elsewhere?

    This moment is not separate from the broader trend of clinical drift. When the national association centralizes power, restricts participation, and treats member voice as a risk to manage rather than a resource to cultivate, it enacts the same individualizing tendencies that have pulled the profession away from macro work.

    A professional body that silences dissent cannot credibly train people in community organizing. An association that treats governance as an internal matter rather than a shared practice cannot credibly promote democratic participation.

    The restructuring is not only a symptom of clinical drift. It is clinical drift expressed through organizational design.

    What Ethical Accountability Requires

    Repair is impossible in an environment of silence. Silence protects those who hold institutional power and isolates those who have been harmed.

    Ethical accountability would require, at minimum:

    1. Clear public explanation of the restructuring decision, including the financial and strategic analysis that drove it and the alternatives considered.
    2. Transparent reporting on the Preferra insurance collapse and the use of insurance-related funds.
    3. Open forums where members, staff, and chapter leaders can process what has happened without fear of retaliation.
    4. Restoration or thoughtful redesign of state-level advocacy capacity that respects the importance of local leadership and relationships.
    5. Independent review of retaliation, intimidation, and workplace climate concerns raised by past and present staff.
    6. Governance reforms that prevent major structural changes from being enacted without meaningful consultation with chapters and members.

    These are not radical demands. They are the minimum for ethical stewardship in any mission-driven organization. They are especially important in a profession that teaches transparency, participation, and accountability as core practice principles.

    Honoring Those Who Cannot Speak

    Many of the people most affected by these decisions are constrained by contracts, risk calculations, or ongoing roles inside the organization. Professionals who have given decades to advocacy and leadership deserve acknowledgment and ethical clarity, even if they cannot safely share their stories in public.

    This article is, in part, an attempt to honor that reality. It draws on what has been said publicly and on what has been shared privately, without attaching names where doing so could create harm.

    If you have insight, concern, or experience related to the restructuring or to NASW governance more broadly, I welcome confidential conversation at hello@themacrolens.com. Not for publication, but to better understand the collective landscape that has brought the profession to this moment.

    The Stakes for the Profession

    The profession of social work cannot afford selective accountability. We cannot insist on transparency from agencies, courts, and legislators while accepting opacity from our own institutions. We cannot teach ethical courage in classrooms while expecting quiet compliance in our professional associations.

    The silence surrounding NASW’s restructuring is beginning to break. What happens next will reveal whether institutional power chooses defensiveness or the ethical courage that social work has long claimed to embody.

    NASW faces a clear choice: commit to meaningful governance reform, or accept continued erosion of credibility and trust.

    There is no third option.

    Start Your Macro Social Work Journey Today

    Get the free guide Intro to Macro Social Work: A Beginner’s Guide. Inside, you’ll find practical tools, clear explanations, and strategies to help you step confidently into macro practice.

    Subscribe below and we’ll send the guide straight to your inbox. Plus, you’ll get new articles and resources from The Macro Lens to keep building your skills.

  • NASW Restructuring and Ethical Accountability: When Chapters Stand Up To Leadership

    Illustration of a suited figure labeled NASW holding the Code of Ethics near a lit lighter, symbolizing ethical risk associated with NASW restructuring.

    Due to the extraordinary response to this article, and the number of professionals who voiced fears around voicing their concerns publicly, I decided to write a follow up article. You can read it here.

    Social workers across the country are concerned, confused, and angry. How can the organization that claims to represent us, the steward of our Code of Ethics, so blatantly violate the values it taught generations of practitioners to defend?

    Last month, national leadership executed sweeping NASW restructuring, resulting in the leaders serving fourteen state chapters being laid off. Many learned of their eliminations at the moment the announcement became public. No transition plans, no member consultation, no collaborative process, and no opportunity for affected chapters to prepare for the loss of their advocacy infrastructure.

    For a membership organization in a profession built on community voice, this was not merely an internal decision. It was an ethical rupture.

    The response was immediate. Iowa issued a vote of no confidence. Kansas publicly stated they were given no rationale or process for the removal of their leadership. Arkansas and Kentucky reported full board resignations. Former directors expressed not only shock, but grief that the relational work of years could be severed without forethought, acknowledgment, or transparency.

    These reactions are not isolated. They are a collective recognition that something fundamental has cracked at the center of our professional home.

    The Values NASW Forgot to Practice

    The execution of the NASW restructuring reflects a fundamental disconnect with our professional values. Social work rests on transparency, accountability, and shared decision making. We teach these principles to students. We write them into policies. We defend them in courtrooms, classrooms, community centers, legislatures, and crisis shelters. They are not aspirational ideals. For many, they are deeply intertwined with our professional and personal identity.

    Yet national leadership made sweeping decisions about chapter consolidation and layoffs without meaningful consultation with members, chapter boards, state leaders, or the Delegate Assembly. What was removed was not only staffing, but presence. Not only roles, but relationships. Not only operations, but the connective tissue of state-level advocacy.

    Paying lip service to our professional values is not enough. We cannot abide a professional organization that refuses to hold itself to the same standards it demands from its members.

    This is why Iowa’s action matters. Their statement was not an act of rebellion, but of fidelity. They spoke not out of hostility, but out of moral obligation.

    Stay informed on macro leadership and ethical accountability

    Subscribe below for analysis on this moment and other systemic questions shaping social work. I share macro practice context, reflections, and resources to support your work.

    Betrayal, Not Disagreement

    It is important to name the emotional truth of this moment. Social workers are not simply upset about process. They are wounded by betrayal.

    Directors like Becky Fast did not hold symbolic roles. They built coalitions, strengthened legislative relationships, and carried advocacy work forward for years in a profession that often erases that labor. To remove them without partnership or dialogue was not a technical oversight. It was a dismissal of what makes this profession function at the state level: trust, time, continuity, and presence.

    The problem is not that NASW made a difficult decision. It is that they made it in a way that violated the relational and ethical commitments that define social work as a profession. We are asked, in every setting, to confront power responsibly, inclusively, and accountably. When NASW leadership bypassed those values, it modeled the very behavior social workers are trained to challenge in systems of harm.

    That disconnect is what social workers feel so viscerally now. Not a policy disagreement, but the sting of hypocrisy.

    The Importance of Iowa’s Stand

    Iowa’s statement did not emerge from impulse. As someone who has served on that board, I can attest to the deliberation, restraint, and ethical seriousness with which they operate.

    This was more than a critical response to a single action from NASW leadership. They were calling out a concerning, sustained pattern of behavior. They cited opaque decision making, lack of disclosure concerning the Preferra lawsuit and loss of member benefits, and alleged retaliation against volunteers and staff who raised concerns.

    Their vote of no confidence reflects the gravity of what has unfolded. NASW leadership repeatedly acted in blatant violation of the professional values they hold sacred. Their alarm is not dramatic, but a measured and appropriate response.

    This is exactly the level of clarity, courage, and integrity we should expect from leadership within our field. The actions of state chapters like Iowa make the failures of national leadership all the more apparent.

    Social workers know how to sit with discomfort, how to speak truth to power, and how to hold systems accountable. We expect that of ourselves. We have the right to demand that of NASW.

    Where Trust Goes From Here

    The NASW restructuring reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how state-level advocacy works. Legislative relationships cannot be managed remotely. Grassroots organizing requires local presence. Policy change demands sustained engagement with specific communities, agencies, and political contexts. Efficiency models that treat advocacy as scalable administrative work will hollow out the very infrastructure that makes social work more than clinical licensing.

    Trust between NASW and its members cannot be restored through email statements, public relations language, or internal talking points. Trust can only be rebuilt through action that reflects the values the profession is named after: transparency, collaboration, and shared leadership.

    Social workers are not asking for perfection. They are asking for participation. They are asking to be included in decisions that redefine their professional landscape. They are asking that their expertise, advocacy relationships, and labor be recognized and respected.

    The profession must demand more from the organizations that claim to represent us. NASW cannot champion justice while practicing exclusion. It cannot require accountability from practitioners while denying it in its own operations. It cannot claim stewardship of values it fails to uphold.

    Social workers deserve better than this. We are better than this.

    The profession deserves an organization that reflects the best of who we are, not the worst of what hierarchy can become.

    If you enjoyed this article, check out our foundational articles: Why Us?, Why Now?, and How? Be sure to subscribe for monthly updates and resources.

    Start Your Macro Social Work Journey Today

    Get the free guide Intro to Macro Social Work: A Beginner’s Guide. Inside, you’ll find practical tools, clear explanations, and strategies to help you step confidently into macro practice.

    Subscribe below and we’ll send the guide straight to your inbox. Plus, you’ll get new articles and resources from The Macro Lens to keep building your skills.

  • Suffering in Plain Sight: How Child Welfare’s Institutional Amnesia Failed My Brothers

    Two boys, approximately ages nine and twelve, sit dejected on concrete steps in a black and white urban scene, symbolizing the instability and invisibility children face under caseworker turnover.

    This piece continues the personal story I began in My Why, where I share the experiences that shaped my commitment to macro social work and empowering lived experience leaders.

    The US child welfare system is deeply flawed. For many children, the greatest and most lasting harm does not come from the events that triggered involvement, but from the system itself. Caseworker turnover and the revolving door of service providers creates a cycle of instability. Each new professional asks children to recount their trauma, and each transition erases the understanding the previous worker painstakingly built.

    I did not come by this truth through research or policy reports. It was hard won, advocating for my half-brothers as the system lost sight of their needs time and time again. Same children, same histories, same needs, yet every new caseworker treated them as blank slates. Each transition meant starting over, because the child welfare system could not remember.

    When Systems Forget

    In 2018, my youngest brothers entered Iowa’s child welfare system for the second time and were placed in my care. The removal itself followed familiar patterns; crisis, intervention, placement. What came after, however, was something more insidious: institutional amnesia.

    The revolving door of service providers began almost immediately. Caseworkers changed. Service coordinators came and went. Each transition brought the same exhausting ritual. New faces asking old questions, requesting information already documented. Strangers forming impressions without context, making decisions that contradicted previous plans.

    It felt like we were starting over from scratch every time their caseworker changed, because we were.

    The system wasn’t just failing to build on existing knowledge. It was actively forgetting what it had already learned about my brothers’ specific needs and trauma histories. Each new professional entered with good intentions but without institutional memory. Armed with case files but missing the lived context that makes those files meaningful.

    The Permanency Plan That Wasn’t

    The worst manifestation of this amnesia came during the transition between the second and third caseworkers on my brothers’ case.

    After more than two years of active child welfare involvement, we finally had a plan. The second caseworker had been critical of my stepmother’s ability to maintain a healthy and positive relationship with the boys. Given the infrequency of visitation and ongoing mental health struggles, he recommended termination of parental rights and my adoption of my brothers.

    At the time, I agreed. He presented a compelling argument, and I trusted his professional opinion. After years of uncertainty, it looked like my brothers would finally have permanency. They could stop holding their breath in anticipation. We could all exhale.

    Then the third caseworker took over.

    During our first conversation, she asked what I wanted to see regarding permanency. Trusting the established plan, I repeated the previous worker’s recommendation of termination and adoption. She didn’t push back. She didn’t comment on it at all.

    Instead, her initial report to the court stated that my “adversarial regard” for my stepmother was harmful the boys. She further recommended that the case should not close until this issue was resolved. She painted me as a harmful agent in my brothers’ lives for the sin of trusting her predecessor’s plan.

    The light at the end of the tunnel was effectively snuffed out, as we started over from scratch yet again.

    Right Outcome, Wrong Method

    Despite that initial antagonistic treatment, I am actually grateful to the third caseworker. Her perspective helped myself and the court recognize the value of the relationship between my brothers and their mother. The case ultimately closed with my stepmother retaining parental rights while I became permanent guardian. My brothers gained stability with me while maintaining a safe and meaningful relationship with their mother. Looking back, it was the best possible outcome.

    But being right doesn’t excuse the methods.

    Had the third caseworker approached me openly, I would have seen the logic and validity of this permanency option. I would have supported it from the start. Her choice to leave me in the dark and paint me as an aggressor was unnecessary, frustrating, and further eroded my trust in the child welfare system.

    This is the insidious nature of institutional amnesia: it doesn’t just lose information, it loses trust.

    The Human Cost of Starting Over

    For my brothers, this nearly three-year case felt like perpetual limbo. Each caseworker transition brought fresh waves of uncertainty about their future. It meant new strangers making decisions about their lives and repeated questions about painful histories.

    The consequences lingered long after the child welfare case closed. My youngest brother lived in a state of emotional limbo for years. The system’s inconsistent messaging around permanency left him uncertain, even after closure. He continued to put his life on hold. He avoided forming friendships, joining activities, or putting down roots in his new community.

    I remember when, nearly two years after the case ended, he finally began to come out of his shell. He made friends at school, planned sleepovers, and became excited about his life again. It was a joyful shift, but it underscored the cost of years spent waiting for an outcome that would never come.

    If the system had provided consistency around permanency from the beginning, I believe he would have acclimated much sooner. The years of his childhood lost were not inevitable, they were preventable.

    The One Who Remembered

    There was one critical exception to this institutional amnesia: my brothers’ Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA).

    Assigned at the onset of my brothers’ case, the CASA volunteer became their constant through nearly three years of system chaos. While caseworkers rotated and service providers changed, she remained. She was the only agent of the system that my brothers truly trusted. The one adult who showed up, who remembered, and who actually saw them.

    She was a godsend, providing the continuity that the formal system failed to maintain. She knew their story not from case notes but from relationship. When new caseworkers entered, she could provide context that files couldn’t capture. When permanency plans shifted, she was the bridge helping my brothers make sense of changes that adults struggled to explain.

    I am forever grateful to my brothers’ CASA. Her involvement in their case inspired me to spend three years as a CASA volunteer myself. I later dedicated my graduate practicum to the CASA program, designing and piloting a comprehensive data system to better track child outcomes, needs, and the systemic barriers they face. This was my first direct effort to ensure the needs of other children and families did not remain invisible, as my brothers’ once had.

    The Systemic Design Flaw

    This is not a story about bad caseworkers, but that of a system designed to fail.

    The professionals involved in my brothers’ case were dedicated, competent people doing their best within impossible constraints. Every one of them cared deeply about my brothers’ wellbeing.

    The problem is that child welfare is designed as if children exist in a perpetual present. As if each assessment captures a stable truth rather than a moment in a long narrative.

    Case files document decisions, but not the reasoning behind them. They record permanency plans, but not the dynamics, observations, and deliberation that shaped those plans. When workers leave, all of that vital context disappears. New workers inherit conclusions without understanding how they were reached.

    This creates a perverse dynamic where each new worker, lacking context, feels compelled to form their own independent judgment rather than risk perpetuating a predecessor’s mistakes. The result is what my family experienced. Not thoughtful course corrections based on new information, but wholesale abandonment of existing plans because the reasoning behind them died when the worker left.

    What Research Tells Us

    An ethnographic study of day to day child protection work helps explain why caseworker turnover and inconsistent staffing are so damaging. The research found that effective child welfare practice depends on intimate engagement with children. It requires the ability to enter a child’s world through careful listening, observation, and relational depth. This level of practice requires sufficient preparation time, organizational support, and reflective supervision. Without these conditions, workers quickly become overwhelmed or cognitively overloaded. The emotional and relational grounding that meaningful assessment requires becomes impossible to maintain.

    The study also found that many workers arrive at visits in a bureaucratically preoccupied state. They are still mentally tethered to administrative demands, computer screens, or the pressure to complete tasks quickly. This state of mind makes it difficult to engage deeply with children or to absorb the sensory and emotional complexity of family environments. When workers lack reflective containment, they struggle to process the anxiety, conflict, or emotional intensity they encounter. This leads to rushed interactions, superficial assessments, and a reliance on procedural checklists rather than thoughtful relational practice.

    The research emphasizes that this is not a matter of individual competence. The same workers practiced skillfully in some cases and detached in others, depending on the emotional demands they faced and the organizational support they received. Caseworker turnover forces workers to start from deficit. They lack the contextual and relational foundations required to truly understand the children in their care.

    Rebuilding Systems That Remember

    If we want child welfare to function, we need more than better documentation or reduced caseloads. We need systems built on the assumption that caseworker turnover will occur, so children do not pay the price.

    A number of promising approaches already exist:

    • Team based models that distribute knowledge across multiple workers.
    • Narrative focused documentation that preserves both decisions and the reasoning behind them.
    • Supervision structures that provide the containment workers need to think clearly and maintain child centered focus.
    • CASA programs that offer relational continuity that agencies struggle to provide.

    These innovations are real, but they are also far from systemic.

    From Amnesia to Accountability

    My brothers are mostly grown now. The final permanency plan served them well, and they are thriving. However, the harm from the system’s inconsistency still matters. They lived with adults repeatedly disagreeing about their future. Professionals disappeared from their lives without explanation. Promises shifted without warning.

    Those experiences shaped them as much as the trauma that led to removal.

    This understanding is the foundation of The Macro Lens. Lived experience is essential to systemic reform. Relationships are not soft skills, they are infrastructure. Systems must be redesigned by those who have lived their consequences.

    Institutional memory is not optional. When systems forget children’s stories, they lose the children themselves.

    Child welfare will continue to fail until we build systems that remember with intention. Ones that protect continuity as fiercely as safety, and recognize that every lost piece of knowledge becomes a wound the next worker must rediscover.

    My brothers deserved a system that built on what it learned, not one that forgot with every transition. So do the thousands of children experiencing discontinuity whenever a caseworker’s email auto reply announces they have moved on.

    To build systems that remember children, we must elevate those who know what it is to be forgotten.

    To learn more about the experiences and commitments that shape my work at The Macro Lens, visit the About Me page.

  • Coalition Building for Social Workers

    A practical framework for creating powerful partnerships that drive systems change

    Illustration of a city skyline with interconnected lines representing coalition building, community networks, and systemic collaboration in social work.

    Social Work Coalition Building

    When you work alone, you’re limited by your own capacity, resources, and sphere of influence. When you build a coalition and bring together diverse partners around a shared vision, you multiply your collective power to create lasting change.

    Coalition building is one of the most essential skills in macro social work, yet it’s rarely taught with the level of practical detail needed to do it well. This guide breaks down the process into seven concrete steps you can follow; whether you’re organizing around a policy change, launching a community program, or addressing a systemic issue that no single organization can solve alone.

    What Is a Coalition?

    A coalition is a temporary or long-term alliance between individuals, organizations, and groups who come together around a shared goal. Unlike a single organization with a formal hierarchy, coalitions work through collaboration, shared decision-making, and distributed leadership.

    Coalitions can be formal (with bylaws, officers, and structured meetings) or informal (loosely organized around specific campaigns). What matters most is not the structure, but the shared commitment to a goal that no one partner could achieve alone.

    In social work, effective coalitions have:

    • Advanced healthcare access by bringing together hospitals, community clinics, and patient advocacy groups
    • Reformed school discipline policies through partnerships between parents, educators, and juvenile justice advocates
    • Secured housing protections by uniting tenants, legal aid organizations, and faith communities
    • Changed child welfare practices when social workers, families with lived experience, and community organizations demanded better

    The 7-Step Coalition Building Framework

    Step 1: Define Your Shared Vision and Goals

    Before inviting anyone to the table, get clear on what you’re trying to accomplish. A coalition without a focused goal quickly becomes a social club—well-intentioned but ineffective.

    Ask yourself:

    • What specific change are we working toward?
    • What would success look like in six months, one year, or three years?
    • Is this goal achievable through collaboration, or could one organization do it alone?

    Be specific. “Improve mental health services” is too broad. “Secure $2 million in county funding for school-based mental health clinicians in underserved districts” gives partners something concrete to rally around.

    Pro tip: If your goal is too large to achieve within one to three years, you may need a movement, not a coalition. Start smaller and build momentum.

    Step 2: Map Potential Partners Strategically

    Not every organization working on a similar issue needs to be in your coalition. Think strategically about who brings what you need.

    Consider partners who offer:

    • Legitimacy: Credibility and trust in the community
    • Resources: Funding, staff time, meeting space, or technology
    • Expertise: Legal knowledge, policy analysis, or lived experience
    • Access: Connections to decision-makers, media, or grassroots networks
    • People power: Members who can mobilize for actions, hearings, or canvassing

    Power map example:

    • Decision-makers: Who has the authority to make the change you want?
    • Influencers: Who has their ear? (Staff, advisors, donors, community leaders)
    • Allies: Who already supports your goal and has influence?
    • Potential partners: Who could be persuaded to join if they understood the issue?

    Critical point: Always include people with lived experience of the issue. If you’re working on homelessness, unhoused individuals must be at the table—not only consulted but included in leadership.

    Step 3: Build Relationships Before You Ask for Anything

    Coalition building is relationship work. You cannot send a cold email asking someone to join and expect genuine commitment.

    Relationship-building strategies:

    • Have informal conversations: Learn about their priorities, challenges, and vision
    • Attend their events: Show up for their work before asking them to show up for yours
    • Find common ground: Identify where your goals naturally align
    • Be transparent about your own capacity and limitations

    If your first interaction is a request to sign a letter or attend a meeting, you’re starting from extraction, not partnership. Trust takes time. Let people see your consistency and genuine commitment to collaboration, not convenience.

    Step 4: Establish Structure and Decision-Making Processes

    Coalitions fail when no one knows who is responsible for what, or when power dynamics go unspoken.

    Key elements:

    • Leadership model: Lead organization, rotating leadership, or a shared steering committee
    • Decision-making: Consensus, modified consensus, majority vote, or delegated authority
    • Roles and responsibilities: Who facilitates meetings, manages communication, tracks action items, or handles media

    Put your agreements in writing. A simple Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) can prevent conflict by clarifying expectations early.

    Step 5: Create Sustainable Meeting Practices

    Meetings are where coalitions live or die. Effective meetings build energy and accountability; poor ones drain both.

    Meeting essentials:

    • Consistent schedule (monthly or quarterly)
    • Clear agenda shared 48 hours ahead
    • Defined outcomes for every meeting
    • Rotating roles (facilitator, note-taker, timekeeper)
    • Accessibility measures (hybrid options, interpretation, childcare)
    • End each meeting with action items and accountability

    A simple flow that works:

    1. Check-in and wins (10 min)
    2. Updates from working groups (15 min)
    3. Decisions and strategy (30–40 min)
    4. Action steps and closing (10 min)

    Only meet when coordination or decision-making truly requires it. Otherwise, share updates by email.

    Step 6: Navigate Conflict and Power Differences

    Coalitions bring together organizations with different cultures, resources, and levels of power. Conflict is inevitable—and healthy when handled well.

    Common tensions:

    • Resource disparities
    • Credit and visibility
    • Pace and tactics
    • Representation in messaging

    Strategies for balance:

    • Name and discuss power differences openly
    • Center grassroots and lived-experience leadership
    • Rotate visibility and speaking opportunities
    • Encourage resource sharing from larger to smaller partners
    • Establish conflict protocols before disagreements arise

    Avoiding conflict doesn’t build trust. Addressing it respectfully does.

    Step 7: Celebrate Wins and Evaluate Honestly

    Momentum sustains coalitions. Celebrate progress, however small, and reflect on lessons learned.

    After each milestone:

    • Celebrate publicly through social media or community events
    • Acknowledge contributions by name
    • Reflect on what worked and what didn’t
    • Document insights for future use

    When it’s time to close:
    If you’ve achieved your goal or the coalition has run its course, end intentionally. Hold a closing conversation about what was accomplished, which relationships will continue, and what resources can be shared with others.

    The Bottom Line

    Coalition building isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about trusting that collective wisdom will surface them. When diverse people, organizations, and communities align around a focused goal, they create power that no single entity can replicate.

    Systems change never happens in isolation. It happens when social workers, community members, advocates, and organizations move in the same direction, united by a vision of justice.

    You don’t need permission to start. You need a clear goal, authentic relationships, and the humility to share power. Start small. Reach out to two or three partners. Find your overlap. Take one action together. That’s how movements begin.

    Ready to Take the Next Step?

    Building coalitions is just one piece of macro social work. For more tools to strengthen your systems-change practice, visit our Macro Social Work Resources Hub: a curated list of 37 free systems work resources across 8 categories.

    Also, subscribe to The Macro Lens newsletter and download your free Intro to Macro Social Work: A Beginner’s Guide.

    This 10-page workbook will help you:

    • Map your transferable skills from micro to macro practice
    • Identify opportunities for systemic change in your current role
    • Reframe barriers that hold social workers back
    • Build your professional network for collective action

    Subscribe today and take your first step from casework to catalyst.

Start Your Macro Social Work Journey Today

Get the free guide Intro to Macro Social Work: A Beginner’s Guide. Inside, you’ll find practical tools, clear explanations, and strategies to help you step confidently into macro practice.

Subscribe below and we’ll send the guide straight to your inbox. Plus, you’ll get new articles and resources from The Macro Lens to keep building your skills.